Data Dude is out in the Wild!
Today we announced Microsoft Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (guess we let the branding people out of their cage again...) formerly known as "Data Dude" internally and by a few select outsiders. All if the info is now live here on MSDN.
Data Dude is the result of a side conversation between folks from VS and SQL back in Oct/Nov of 2004 about how a class of Database Professional was being underserved by both Microsoft and the industry in terms of the tools/experience they had for developing data centric applications. While I have not been involved in the project since the very early days I am very excited to see the project making its public appearance.
Some of the folks working on the project will be very familiar, Gert Drapers is a long time member of the SQL Server dev team and community, Richard Waymire is an author, former MVP, former member of the dev team, Matt Nunn former Product Manager for SQL Server, Thomas Murphy is formerly of Gartner and Cameron Skinner, who leads the team, has a wealth of industry experience in the space.
I've added all the blogs to my blog roll as they are going to become an increasingly important part of the VS and SQL community as time goes on. Oh and they have the offices the floor above me so I don't want stuff getting thrown down at me :-)
Update: Great tagline from one of the testers on the Data Dude team;
Database developers rejoice! The cavalry is coming…
Update 2: Added more blog links from the team.