VsDbCmd UI Utility – A User Interface for VsDbCmd to help with packaging and command line parameter overload

Benjamin Day Consulting, Inc.: The Blog - A User Interface for VsDbCmd: Deploy/Import Your Database Schema Without Installing Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition

“There’s an underappreciated feature in Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition (DbPro) and that’s VsDbCmd.exe.  If you’re using DbPro to manage your database schema during development, you’re doing it with Visual Studio installed on your desktop.  When you need to deploy changes to production, you do a Database Comparison between your project and your production database and DbPro generates an update script for you that publishes your changes to the production database. 

This works great if you can connect to your production database from your developer workstation.  What if you can’t connect from your developer workstation?  Do you need to install DbPro on the production machine? 

Thankfully, the answer is no.  This is where VsDbCmd.exe comes in.  VsDbCmd is a command-line tool that you can put on a USB thumb drive (or copy over the network) to a machine that does not have DbPro installed.  Once you’ve copied VsDbCmd to that machine, you have two very helpful features:

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But there’s a catch.  You’ve got to package up a handful of files that VsDbCmd needs to run.  This step is a little confusing and tedious. Once you get everything packaged up and copied over to your database machine, you have to remember the command-line syntax for doing your Import or Deploy.  Not that hard but there’s some hunting around and tweeking required to get it right.

It would be nice if there were a user interface for VsDbCmd, huh?  Well, I wrote one!  (You’re welcome. <grin />)

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Summary

VsDbCmd is a great feature in Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition.  Hopefully, this UI will make it easier for you to use it so that you can manage your database schema development and deployment just like the rest of your software development efforts.

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Sometimes you just need a little clicky…

This is cool for those who don’t live in Data Data day in and out. Also interesting that it’s deployed as a Click-once application…

 

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