Final CTP Approaching

We are in the final testing phases of our final CTP ( CTP7 ). ( Think of this as our release candidate! ). CTP7 will be out early next week. I want to discuss a couple of important topics about the upcoming release in this post.

CTP7 Installation Requirements

In order to ready ourselves for RTM, CTP7 will now require a retail version of Visual Studio Team Suite ( VSTS ) or the trial version of VSTS ( found here ). Why is this? That is how our evaluation process will work once released. If a customer is looking to evaluate VSTS or any role based product in the suite, they are required to download the VSTS trial bits. We are very close to releasing the product, so we are essentially providing you access to CTP7 in evaluation mode. Be warned: the VSTS trial bits are a hefty download!

New Features

There are a few small ( but important! ) features that we have put into CTP7 ( along with continued bug fixing and perf improvements ) that I do want to mention. The first one is the ability to control how many warnings / errors you want to see at one time in your error and warnings tool window. If you select Tools->Options... and then select Database Tools->Design-time Validation Database, you'll see this dialog:

Max Errors Option Fill in whatever number you'd like. The default is 200.

Along the same lines, we have put in the ability to suppress warnings via a text box on the Build tab of your database project. Just type in a comma separated list of warning you do not want to see in your Error List window ( don't include the "TSD" prefix in the text box, just the numbers ).

Suppress Warnings

Another feature we squeezed in is the ability to assign different properties to individual objects in your project that differ from the default properties specified in the database project properties tab ( right click on the database project node and select "Properties" ). Specifically, in CTP7 we now allow you to override the project settings that control the ANSI Nulls and Quoted Identifiers settings. See the image below.

Object level property overrides 

Also understand that we are committed to preserving compatibility between projects created in CTP6 on up, all the way through RTM.

As usual, any questions, please let me know!

Cameron