Microsoft has announced that its team development tool for database professionals will be released to manufacturing on Nov. 30.
Officials at the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker said Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals is a market-shifting database development product designed to manage database change, improve software quality through database testing and bring the benefits of Visual Studio Team System and application life-cycle development to the database professional.
The company announced the product at the end of May and released an initial CTP (Community Technology Preview) in mid-June.
Moreover, Microsoft officials said database architects, developers, administrators and other database professionals can use the product to employ integrated change-management functionality to streamline changes to their databases.
In addition, database professionals can use the new tool to drive better quality earlier in the development process through integrated database testing, including support for database unit tests, complex test authoring and automatic generation of test data, officials said.
In addition, Microsoft recently announced the availability of an update to its MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework) for Agile Software Development and MSF for CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) Process Improvement to include deep integration of database developers and database administrators into the application life cycle.
Microsofts Sachin Rekhi, a program manager on Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, gave a talk about the new process guidance for database professionals at the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas the week of Nov. 6.
In a description of the session on his blog, Rekhi said that just having tools is not enough. “In order to reap the benefits of this new way of working with databases, you also need to embrace a new process for the way you do the work,” Rekhi wrote. “In this session, we will discuss the new MSF Agile and CMMI processes and show how with a combination of the new Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals tools and the adoption of slightly new processes, you can see significant benefits both in productivity and quality.”