posted on Monday, June 27, 2005 6:59 AM by Simon Thorneycroft

Geek Dinner

I went to the Geek Dinner in Crowborough on Wednesday (22nd June).  It was a really interesting event and great fun to be able to talk to other Geeks over a curry.  The conversation centred less on programming issues, although that was a significant part of it, but more on the history of computing over the years and those early days using a ZX81 with its keys made of some kind of 'dead skin'.

Simon Harriyott was interested in source control for his SQL Server database scripts, an area where he felt the tool support was lacking somewhat.  We talked about a number of options, but it seemed that the closest we could get was to code SQL inside of Visual Studio (Simon is lucky enough to be targetting his apps at .NET Framework 2 and thus he develops inside Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2).

All in all a great event and I am looking forward to the next one.

Comments

# re: Geek Dinner

Monday, June 27, 2005 7:42 AM by Jonathan Hodgson
This seems to be a pain point for a number of people, the usual Microsoft answer is to run SQL Server under an account with rights to Visual Sourcesafe, http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/tdlg_ch7.asp

Other ideas are using a package like Red-gate Sql Compare and periodically scripting the entire database for comparison later, or DBGhost, http://www.innovartis.co.uk/home.aspx

Thycotic software have a free utility which can create a script for rebuilding your database, http://www.thycotic.com/dotnet_dbscripter.html.

Also SQL Source Control 2003, http://www.skilledsoftware.com/sqlsourcecontrol.htm

Or extra build tasks in MSBuild/NAnt to automate changes out to VSS?