Flickr has decided to give the gift of additional bandwidth. Free accounts can now upload 100mb a month (previously 20mb) and Pro accounts now have unlimited bandwidth (previously 2gb a month).

This is hardly breaking news for all those who are in fact, Database Professionals, but it was worth noting that this has finally been released. I'm not actively using this version of VSTS but the DB architect on my project simply rants and raves over how great this new tool is.

In my opinion, the coolest feature is the ability to do schema compares and data compares. I've always thought that these types of synchronization tools were extremely important for several reasons:

1. It ensures that all of the staging environments are running off of the same database schema.
2. It allows easy deployment promotions to Staging, QA, and Production servers. Its really easy to ignore individual changes made between deployments since it is now easy to run a comparison and generate a single large change script.
3. It is a helpful tool for troubleshoot vague data access issues.

Here is a screenshot of the new VSTS Database Pro Edition using Schema Compare.

Brian Keller has provided the opportunity for you to submit any Team Foundation Server questions for his upcoming Visual Studio Team System Channel 9 interview with Brian Harry. If you recall, Brian Harry recently posted about the roadmap for TFS, and in the interview he has agreed to take some questions. I submitted a question regarding TFS's inability to track requirements and if it will be released in subsequent versions...lots of people have been asking this.

Check out already-recorded VSTS Channel 9 videos

One of the common gripes about Team Foundation Server is that fact that it doesn't support out-of-the-box continuous integration. Well Im sure the team had their reasons to exlude this feature in the first release, but hopefully we will get this in a future release. Until, then we will to come up with something on our own. Ben Waldron addresses these concerns in his Agile Development MSDN article on TFS and Continuous Integration.

Brian Harry's latest post lays out the roadmap for Team Foundation Server.

When I think about the TFS roadmap, I think about 3 different categories of things:

Servicing – These are Hot fixes, Service Packs, etc that fix bugs and add new capabilities to versions that have already shipped (today, that means TFS 2005)

Out of Band releases – We call them Power Tools (used to be Power Toys).  These are add-on tools/utilities that enhance the value of already shipped products without actually modifying them directly.

Major releases – These are the big new releases.  The next one is called Visual Studio “Orcas”.  In parallel, we are also actively developing for the release after Orcas, which I’ll describe at a high level.

...........

Please check out his post for a more specifics.

Last month I posted on Mario Rodriguez's blog post in which he was requesting community feedback regarding TFS Version Control Check-In policies. As a result of the feedback which was received, the TFS Version Control team is going to be releasing a Control Check-In Policy Pack.

In his latest post the current goals of the pack of policies are described:

Check-in policy granularity: there is one already in Code Gallery and what we will do is package this, change some of the UI and take out some of the complexity

Work-Item Associations: This is a very cool one that I hope many of you will find useful. You get to specify a query and if the associated work items by the developer are not part of the query results the check-in is blocked. This is very useful when it comes to making sure that check-ins are always associated with approved bugs.

Banned files: this policy allows you to specify a file extension or a regular expression in order to keep files that you don’t want out of version control. This is usually used for dll’s, build artifacts, or some website files that are automatically generated.

Check-in Comments: this policy gets shipped as part of the SDK. It looks at the check-in comments and makes sure it is not blank.

Here is the situation:

You need to deploy a new version of your ASP.NET application but the application is running and consequently the .dll's are unable to be deleted because they are "being used by another process". What you would normally do is remote into that machine and kill the ASP.NET worker process (or take the application offline in IIS) so that the .dlls could be released. Only then could you delete the existing files and copy over the new application.

The problem: What if you do not have access to remote into the server and cannot kill the ASP.NET worker process or to take down the application in IIS. How in the world could you deploy these files if you cannot take the application offline in order to release the .dlls from memory?

The solution: ASP.NET 2.0 introduced the feature where you could place a file called app_offline.htm in the root directory of the application, and this would take the app offline. As a result, the runtime files are released and you are able to update your application as well as to provide a .htm page with description of the problem. This is a tremendous help.

Thanks to Sasha for his help finding this feature and if you would like additional information you can check out Scott Guthrie's post on App_offline.htm.

I found yet another post at the Vertigo Team System blog which once again warns of the dangers of using the vs2005 website approach rather than the Web Application Projects. I do feel like I've been beating a dead horse about this, but I thought this was worth mentioning because it made its recommendations specifically from the Team System point of view. The author listed a reason, which I had never thought of, to choose the WAP over the Website:

it's impossible to check in code analysis rules on Web Site projects, because the code analysis rules are stored entirely on the client!

Overall, I just can't wait for the VS2005 SP1 to come out so that we can put all of this nonsense behind us and avoid having to sell the idea of using a project add-in rather than the VS2005 standard approach. What a mess this all was.