Greetings from the Quest Oracle DSP Team,

I’d like to give you a little bit of insight into what we are currently working on. Sort of give you an insider’s view of what’s going on here at Quest. After almost 3 man-years of work, we’re approaching our first beta release. The team is getting excited. Our latest challenge has been to integrate Microsoft’s latest internal drop of DbPro. One of our team members, Wayne, took it on as soft of a personal challenge. He integrated our code in a couple of days! We’d originally slated at least a week for all of us. That’s what it’s been like on our team. We’ve got a dedicated bunch of very talented people rising to the challenge.

Because of Wayne’s efforts, we are now running against the same DbPro core as the Visual Studio 2008 GDR Database Edition. As we prepare for our beta we are looking to the horizon and getting ready for the next big hurdle: Visual Studio 2010. This is the release that will have the public extensibility APIs that we will need when we release (they aren’t public in the 2008 GDR release). There are going to be a lot of great changes for the dev community as a whole in VS2010. From a geek’s perspective I’m looking forward to the new WPF-based editor. I’ve been itching to get my hands on it.

I’m currently working on implementing the script document object model (ScriptDOM). It’s the piece that creates a model of DDL scripts. Loosely, it’s the same idea as the DOM model for HTTP documents. You might have encountered it if you’ve ever worked with JavaScript in an HTML page. Basically, it lets us programmatically alter any script. It’s a major piece of our Oracle Object Designer. It’ll allow our designer to interact with your DDL scripts and keep the DDL valid at all times.

There’s a lot of interesting work going on here at Quest. We’ll try and keep you informed of what’s going on as the days and weeks progress.

Dwight