MSDN Magazine - October 2008 - (Page 60) VENDOR-SPONSORED CONTENT 2008 Professional Edition, but Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition adds code coverage information. With this you can ensure that your unit tests are being run against the appropriate pieces of code and you can find out where there is dead code or where you can provide more data to get more complete tests. You can also run the tests and the code coverage metrics to gather information during the Team Foundation Server Build process that allows you to see trends in your code and provides quality indicators before the code is released. Visual Studio Team System 208 Database Edition enables you to write unit tests for your database stored procedures and functions. You can now easily and consistently generate realistic data for testing purposes and have your database environment re-created for each testing session so you are always testing against a clean environment. Using the Data Generation features, you can create statistical data, bind to existing data sources and output the resulting generated data to a database or text file so that the data can be version-controlled. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition’s performance monitoring and testing tools can help you meet quality-of-service requirements and provide concrete data to the customers that the application performs as advertised. You can performance-test your entire application or just small sections of it by turning unit tests into performance tests. This allows you to easily identify performance bottlenecks before the customer discovers them. Instead of having to hunt all over the code to find the performance problems, the Hot Path feature of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition allows you to pinpoint the slowest path through the code so you can apply and verify fixes quickly. Development Edition and Database Edition, a developer can write all of their code in one environment and be able to match up client code and database code to ensure that everything works together. One of the biggest stumbling blocks prior to the availability of the Visual Studio Team System was that the database code was usually not properly version-controlled. You couldn’t go back and look at the previous version of a stored procedure and you couldn’t figure out who made what change to which piece of the database. With Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition you can. One recurring stumbling block to working with the whole application (the front end, middle tiers and the database) is that if you rename a column you have to change the stored procedures, the functions and then change your code. Some changes require you to touch a lot of places in your application. Refactoring the database is simple with Database Edition’s built-in refactoring tools, so it minimizes your pain. You can change a name in one place and Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition will automatically make that change in all of the database code (including your database unit tests) for you. This allows you to quickly and easily adjust your database to changing needs without compromising the quality of your code, and your productivity increases! Deploy Your Code Without Forgetting Your Code Have you ever written code, deployed it and then had the deployment not work right? You wrote the user interface, wrote the business logic and data access code and database-stored procs and tables. Then you had to deploy the changes to production. Maybe you compiled the code and deployed it and it didn’t work because you forgot the stored procedures and tables? Being able to write code and database code and have it all tied into a piece of functionality (work item), which lets you see everything associated with it prevents a lot of little problems (big problems too). Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition and Database Edition combined with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server gives you the ability to see everything that has to go with a change. It gives you the traceability from the functionality to the code to the database and makes it less likely that issues such as these will occur. And with the new features of the Database Edition GDR, releasing the right code at the right time for the right database is easier than it has ever been. With existing tools it is the responsibility of the development team to track down all of the scripts that have been created or updated for a release. Then you have From the UI to the Data Today you develop applications that support anywhere from 10 users to 10,000 users or more. No matter what the application size they almost all have one thing in common—they take information from users on the front end and retrieve data from a data store on the back end. Traditionally, the developer has had to use entirely separate tools to work with code and data. This increased the complexity of writing applications, required additional tools and training and usually meant that you could not manage your database code like your application code. In the past there might be a separate developer for the database (the specialized “database developer”) but now developers need to be able to write front-end code and database code. Using Visual Studio Team System 2008
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