When you install the database projects template of SSDT you get SQL Server Object Explorer (SSOX) installed as well. SSOX is a pane within Visual Studio and is the main enabler of the Connected Development experience that the SSDT team have attempted to provide. SSOX provides some really cool capabilities that are not in SQL Server Management ...

One of the major criticism to DAX is the lack of a decent editor and more in general of a dedicated IDE, like the one we have for T-SQL or MDX. Well, this is no more true. On Codeplex a very interesting an promising Visual Studio 2010 extension has been released by the beginning of November 2011: http://daxeditor.codeplex.com/ Intellisense, ...

Its no great secret that Juneau, a collection of features in the forthcoming SQL Server codenamed Denali, will be in the next version of Visual Studio but its nice to have it confirmed all the same. I have installed the first publicly available drop of that next version (known as Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, download from here) that was ...

Over the past few weeks I have been making heavy use of the Database tools in Visual Studio 2010 (formerly known as datadude, DBPro, VSTS for Database Professionals or one of a plethora of other names that it has gone by over the past few years) and one of the features that has most impressed me has been database references.   Database ...

Introduction I recently upgraded from Vista Ultimate (x64) to Windows 7 Ultimate (x64). So far I really like Windows 7, but I'm still in the honeymoon phase. I ran into an issue creating new packages using SSIS 2005 and found a solution I thought I'd share. The Error Unfortunately for both of us, I did not capture a screenshot of ...

Cool things are coming out of Mix08! There's even something there for we database people: SQL Server Data Services. From Neil Hutson's blog: SSDS you can think of as a structured data store in the cloud(building block service), which is accessed using Internet protocols using a basic data manipulation language. SSDS is for developers and ...

This is cool! Microsoft is giving away software - including SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, Windows 2003 Standard Edition, and Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Editions - to college students. It's called DreamSpark and it puts professional software tools in the hands of students interested in learning more about designing and ...