I know I've been a little quiet on the blog front lately and I thought I'd let you know what's going on.
My very small (but highly talented) development team has been hard at work on several key projects for our business (e-commerce, integration, business intelligence, etc.) and we've finally decided to take the plunge on Team Foundation Server. So, far, our experiences have been excellent and I'm pretty impressed with how TFS works, especially for source control. I do sleep a lot better at night knowing all our source code (web, BizTalk, C#, VB.NET, T-SQL, scripts, etc.) is under "centralized" control and being backed up regularly.
We've also been accepted into the Visual Studio for Database Professionals (Team Data or Data Dude) TAP (technology access program) and have just gotten started with the CTP3 build. Here's my first impression on this new VS sku and you can quote me...
"Man, do I wish this tool had been released twelve months ago!"
We've been playing around with the "reverse engineering" and "schema comparison" aspects and for a beta, it's pretty damn solid! There are a few rough edges, but I really believe these guys (Robert, Cameron, Gert, Sachin, Richard, Thomas and Matt) are on the right track. And this team really listens to their TAP customers, even small ones like us!
After using this tool for only a few days, I can't image going back to using the SQL Query Analyzer or SQL Management Studio for database development again and this is just an early CTP build. One thing I really appreciate is the opportunity to discuss the product's features with our TAP contact and have a hand (however small) in shaping the product's future. Just like the Commerce Server guys, the Team Data team really seems interested in making this a product for all aspects of the database development life-cycle.
If you haven't downloaded the CTP3 build yet, you really should! We're using it right now for two mission critical projects and it's already made our development lives a whole lot easier!