ActiveWriter for VS 2008

One of the recent additions to our toolkit has been ActiveWriter - a GUI for generating NHibernate classes and mapping files.

So before we can make the final jump to using 2008 for all our development, ActiveWriter needs to work.

Gökhan is planning an update that will work on 2008 - hopefully in a few weeks.

Wondering if it might not be too hard to do the port myself, I dove in and pointed VS 2008 at the latest source code.

Ouch!

I'm not an expert in the DSL tools stuff (which probably doesn't help), but things do appear have changed a little between 2005 and 2008. I wonder if you're better off creating new projects and copying over the content rather than just doing an upgrade.

Specifically in the ActiveWriter code, it makes use of the IVsDataConnectionsService interface. I'm not sure of the history of this interface, but it does appear that it has disappeared from the 2008 SDK.

Curiously, this interface doesn't even appear documented in the 2005 SDK, and I'm not clear what the appropriate replacement should be.

RikMigrations (database migration)

Roy mentions RikMigrations. I too am quite ignorant about Ruby, though I am certainly aware of how popular it has become.

Something to keep an eye on which might be useful in the future.

Currently we use Red Gate's SQL Compare to do a diff between our test and production databases. SQL Compare then generates the necessary T-SQL to modify the production schema to synchronise it to the same as test.

This works very well for us, so I'm interested as to what benefits a tool like RikMigrations would bring.

New phone

My new phone was delivered this afternoon.

It is a HTC TyTN II.

It came in a very cool box.

I've unpacked it, and it is now charging.

I'm being very patient.