Share via

CTP of VS 2008 support for SQL Server 2008

  • Article

If you were at the Dublin community launch event on Feb 13th you saw an ASP.NET / VE / SQL Server 2008 demo that I put together during Dave's talk on Windows Server 2008. (Philip from MTUG was sitting beside me, not doubt a little concerned that I should have had my demos done by then :-))

When I highlighted the code involved if you were paying attention :-) you may have seen that I was using regular ADO.NET code rather than LINQ to select / insert details of the pushpins on my VE map. I side-stepped the VS 2008 / SQL 2008 interop issue, but basically at the moment if you try to open a DB conn to SQL 2008 from VS 2008 you may get the following error:

“This server version is not supported. Only servers up to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 are supported.” There is, however, runtime connectivity. Obviously, since my demo worked.

This CTP addresses this issue, and enables the following Visual Studio functionality for SQL Server 2008:

  • Server Explorer successfully connects to SQL Server 2008, and database objects such as stored procedures and table data can be viewed and edited. Note that table schemas still cannot be viewed or edited in this release.

  • SQL CLR projects that target SQL Server 2008 can be created and deployed to the server.

  • T-SQL and SQL CLR debugging are now enabled for SQL Server 2008.

  • Data binding features in Client and Web Projects are enabled.

    However, this CTP does not support the following features for SQL Server 2008:

  • Creating and editing table schemas in Table Designer or Database Diagrams. The table designer feature in SQL Server Management Studio 2008 can be used to edit table schemas in SQL Server 2008.

  • Using the LINQ to SQL Designer with SQL Server 2008

By the way, I've had a couple of requests for the code of that Demo - I need to tidy it up first, but I will post it to my blog when it's done.