Initial Impressions from TechEd
"Data Dude" Team:
I attended your sessions this week at TechEd (except the chaulk talk), and even did the Hands On lab. All-in-all, I am super impressed and can't wait to start using it against some real systems I've been working on. Great job!
One thing in particular that I noticed (or perhaps, didn't notice) was the lack of an 'ERD-like' designer for table / relationship modeling. I first saw this while going through the lab and it asked me to write the T-SQL for a Foreign Key constraint. I think I've almost always done that via the ERD model via drag-and-drop, so that was a bit of a disappointment. Of course, if I just missed it then I am happy to stand corrected. :)
The other thing that I need to play with to decide how well it will work is the automatic generation of schema update scripts. I've found that there often is a need to write some transformation sql to change my data to comply with new schemas. I know that there are the pre/post script execution that I can tie into, and just need to think about whether that will satisfy the scenarios I typically see.
The other thing that I'm curious about is whether there is an extensibility story around the Refactorings. Right now there is just the Rename refactoring, and this might be a nice niche area for folks like DevExpress and JetBrains to build on what you've provided. I did see how the Generator and Unit Test extensibility works (I'm sooo pumped for the data generation features!).
Again, great job, can't wait for it!
Brenton
