Greetings (and I apologise for the long post), I'm trying to write an Add-in for VS 2010 to provide some automation in database projects. I've received some help from the MSDN forums but I'd like to get opinions from those of you who may have gone down this road before.
We have some complex database projects with many dependencies. The projects are designed to be components for other database solutions and are themselves made up of components. We need to deploy to external networks and have elected to set the "Deploy action" to "Create a deployment script (.sql)". The solution consists of a number of separate projects that make up the components of the system. Some target deployment environments will receive some of these components whilst different deployment targets will receive a different mix of components. To support this we use the "Deployment Project" method. We have a database project that holds the pre & post deployment scripts and only references to the component projects. When deploying a release project the DBA has to do the following:- Open the solution and select the particular deployment project. Check that the project .sqldeployment file has the correct settings and set the target connection string and target database for the deployment. Open each referenced project and ensure that the .sqldeployment and database connection settings are correct in each one. Point the release at a copy of the target production database version and deploy. The output window will show the deployment order for each of the referenced projects. The resultant .sql scripts are then executed in that order against the copy of production and verified as deployed correctly. These scripts are them shipped over to the production environment and executed against each of the production databases. The parts that I would like to automate are the tedious comparisons of the .sqldeployment settings and the target database connection settings. I can use the DTE object model to find the .sql deployment files in each of the referenced projects and do a simple comparison of the settings from the xml therein. I will be able to show a report on the differences so the DBA can take appropriate action. I did not seem to be able to find the TargetConnectionString and TargetDatabase properties, which are stored in the .dbproj file, using either the automation objects or the configuration manager objects. I was advised, on the MSDN forums, to use the MSBuild object model instead. This works fine and I will be able to include comparisons of these settings in my report page. The big problem is that there seems to be no way of editing the connection properties without the IDE detecting the change and prompting for a reload of the project(s). This can take many minutes, whilst the database models are rebuilt, and I'd like to avoid this. These properties can be edited in the IDE through the project properties pages without triggering a reload and I'd be very grateful if I could find a similar way using some sort of automation. -- Regards, noonie
