The Ashdar Partners Blog

While at University in the eighties, I didn't learn much in the way of useful software development tactics or strategies. It was just a question of fulfilling the homework requirements and getting past the exams. I was an EE student and not a ComSci major, after all. When I started my first job out of college, which was as much about programming as it was engineering, I was introduced to version control in the form of the PolyTron Version Control System, or PVCS. At that time, I worked in a two-person coding group. PVCS kept us from stepping on each other's work and allowed us to track our changes, using nothing more than the legendary MS-DOS command line.   When I moved on to my second job, the coding environment was more complex and chaotic. I was surprised that the version control strategy consisted of occasionally pkzipping the source files. The product itself was somewhat confused. I've worked on many projects since then, and it always seems that the better-run p...

This blog entry consists of my notes and thoughts from the PSSUG meeting at Microsoft's offices in Malvern on 2012/12/12. Any misunderstandings are mine. The evening was broken up into three parts. First , Kevin Howell presented " Visual Studio 2012: A Complete IDE (Debugging and Source Control" . He covered some of the enhancements since Visual Studio 2010. He did a quick demo of server-side debugging of a stored procedure, and pointed out a few configuration changes that you must make to your solution before you can use this feature. Kevin particularly likes the schema comparison feature, now part of SQL Server Data Tools, which I think debuted back in Visual Studio 2008 or 2005 as an add-on/down-loadable thing. He points out that you need to be using the Premium or Ultimate editions of Visual Studio 2012 to use schema comparison feature. The comparison feature does seem greatly improved, even over Visual Studio 2010 and is light years beyond what was available...