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.