Thursday, October 30, 2014

Place the Database under Source Control - free eBook

Normally, a Source and Version control system shows huge benefits in coordinating the efforts of the development team, ensuring a complete audit trail of all changes to the code files, and allowing the team to reproduce any specific revision or build.

Database developers can and should also benefit from source control's audit history and change-tracking capabilities, but there's more to it than simply placing a few database build scripts into a subfolder of the application development team's project folder in source control. Unlike application developers, database developers are not assembling files into a neat little application package, but are instead running scripts that feed off each other and off existing database objects, while negotiating the close interdependency between the code and the data.

To cover what we can call "Database Lifecycle Management", and consider it a branch of ALM, RedGate has developed an interesting free ebook, called "SQL Server Source Control Basics"

Unfortunately, the book's authors decided to use SVN, but you can take the core concepts and bring them to Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online as well.

Topics include:
  • Source control core concepts
  • Choosing a database version control system and structure
  • Branching and merging strategies
  • Automating database versioning and deployment from source control
  • An introduction to database continuous integration


The eBook gives a detailed walkthrough of database source control concepts, with code samples and clear examples.

You can download it, for free, here:

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Visual Studio Online REST API version 1.0

Today the first official version of the REST API of Visual Studio Online has been released, the version 1.0.

Announced in May as preview, now these APIs have reached a great maturity. This doesn't mean that they are done with the APIs completely but rather that a core set are now complete and from here forward, they’ll be versioning them for backward compatibility so all the apps that use them don’t break every time they update them. 

Together with this announce, they have updated the "API Reference portal" and the "Getting started guide".

Important
If you have existing apps using the 1.0 preview APIs, you should start migrating to the release 1.0 APIs as soon as possible. Graduated preview APIs (any API in the 1.0 set) are subject to stop working in 12 weeks from today. To learn more about versioning and migrating, see the "versioning and migration page".

That said, remember that, starting from today, the Visual Studio Online REST APIs follow this pattern:

VERB https://{account}.VisualStudio.com/DefaultCollection/_apis[/{area}]/{resource}?api-version=1.0

Monday, October 13, 2014

Integrate an application or a service with Visual Studio Online - MSDN Guest Post

On friday was published on MSDN Italy my second Guest post in which I talk about how is possible and easy to integrate our applications or services with Visual Studio Online using the new REST APIs and the Service Hooks.

To read the whole article (available only in italan) just clik on this link:

Monday, October 6, 2014

Easily migrate from Team Foundation Server to Visual Studio Online - MSDN Guest Post

Today was published on MSDN Italy my Guest post in which I explain how to migrate from a Team Foundation Server (the normal on-premises installation scenario) to its corresponding on-cloud version Visual Studio Online and which are the reasons that could push to do so.

To read the articlae (available only in italan) just clik on this link: