Jason Zander on what Visual Studio 2010 Offers SQL Devs

Recently, Jason Zander, the Microsoft general manager for Visual Studio, met with Michael Otey, SQL Server Magazine’s technical director, and Sheila Molnar, executive editor of DevConnections Magazine and SQL Server Magazine. We focused the conversation around Microsoft’s developer strategy—its history, the Visual Studio 2010 R2 release, and the future of developer products and services at Microsoft.

For the SQL Mag developer audience we asked Jason about changes in Visual Studio 2010 that focused on database development. Here is what he said:

“My team will have the data support in Visual Studio Premium. We released a version of that with 2008. We’ve updated it now. We’ve got partners: Like IBM has done DB2 and we announced with Quest Software that we’ll have Oracle support. Database support in the tool from an ALM perspective gives you things like stored procedure refactoring, data testing, moving more specifically to SQL Server itself to match up with it. A lot of improvements have been made around the libraries and things at the core. Things like adding the next version of the Entity Framework that goes into .NET Framework 4.0 and the POCO (or the plain old CLR objects) and things like that. Agility: that’s another thing. You want to be able to construct and do your objects very straightforwardly. There’s a bunch of brand-new support inside of the libraries in particular and then on top of that. Gives you a combination from the frameworks, all the way up through ALM.”