By now most of the .Net community is well aware that .Net 4.0 and VS2010 will ship with System.Data.OracleClient deprecated. This means your .Net application will build with warnings. BUT, it will still build and work, and Microsoft is still providing critical patch support for this Oracle .Net provider.

I’ve fielded a number of questions about this move and what impact it may have on the Oracle Database Schema Provider we are building for VS2010. The short answer is that it will have no impact. While our DSP intially relied on System.Data.OracleClient we’ve already planned to move to ODP.Net in order to take advantage of the richer feature set. ODP.Net and other 3rd party providers will be able to keep pace with Oracle releases better than a library that ships with .Net(which would be coupled with .Net releases rather than Oracle releases).

So overall, this isn’t at all as detrimental as it may seem on the surface. In the end any software product that moves to ODP.Net or a 3rd party provider will benefit from increased features and release timing.

Daniel Wood.

Today’s been a busy day. http://www.facebook.com/pages/TeamFuze/73998739546

This is an interesting video about why VSTS is a good investment. Source: www.bitpipe.com

Visual Studio Team System: Why It’s a Good Investment in Today’s Challenging Economy

We’re going to be showing off our warez at the ODTUG conference in Monterey, CA in two weeks (June 22 - 24). We’re nearly complete with the beta at this point and hope to have it ready for distribution VERY soon! At the show, you can see the beta in action, running in VSTS 2010, and ask all of the questions you can think of. Look for us in the Quest Software booth (#12) and we’ll give you a free TeamFuze t-shirt!

We’ve set up a Twitter feed, so all you Twitter-heads can keep track of what we’re doing: http://twitter.com/TeamFuze

eWeek reported this week that the Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta 1 drop isavailable to MSDN subscribers on May 18th and to the public on May 20th. Presumably, more info on the public release can be found here when it’s released: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx

This means that we should be ready to release our first beta within the next 4 - 6 weeks. Stay tuned!!!

Daniel

I was recently interviewed by Martin Woodward of Radio TFS about the new DSP for Oracle that we’re working on. There’s lots of good info in there about the DSP - check it out!

Radio TFS: http://www.radiotfs.com/2009/04/10/OracleSupportForVisualStudioTeamSystem.aspx
iTunes (episode #19): http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=274094361

Daniel Norwood

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

Today, Quest Software announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver a rich Oracle development experience in VSTS Developer 2010. I’m personally stoked about this. I have developed applications for Oracle using various IDEs over the years. I’ve also worked on the client aid building apps in Visual Studio most recently with .net. I’ve always found Visual Studio to be a rich environment and hoped someday that experience would extend to encompass Oracle development. It’s nice to see that day is today!

My dev team and I starting building the Quest database schema provider (DSP) for Oracle support almost 1 year ago. We are leveraging the open extensibility of the database tools layer in VSTS and Quest’s extensive codebase of Oracle support to allow Oracle developers to work offline to design, develop and version control database schemas. Over the coming months we will blog about all of the great features in this product. I can’t wait to get the beta out there to see all the cool ways this gets used.

–Daniel Wood

 About Me:

I am currently a development manager at Quest Software, Inc. where I’ve worked since 2001. My time at Quest was spent primarily developing and delivering database management tools. I’ve worked in a wide variety of industries developing database, web, and client applications using a variety of technologies. When I’m not coding I try to hit the beach, the ski slopes or the trails; the further away from a computer the better.

What I hope to accomplish with the database schema provider to is to make life easier for us database developers. Nirvana for this project is to be able to sit down with Visual Studio and focus on solving the real world problems involving an Oracle database instead of spending time fiddling with disparate pieces of software.

Welcome to the TeamFuze blog! This is the stuff that dreams are made of…