We are mainly a Microsoft shop, but our enterprise databases are housed in Oracle and will be for the foreseeable future. Does anyone know of any vendors that will be extending VSTS to accommodate Oracle developers? I would assume that each Oracle database developer would need a Team Foundation Server Client license, but what else could be done to plug these developers into the processes enforced by VSTS?
Oracle just released a plugin to VS2003 called ODT (Oracle Developer Tools) and they have said that they are going to release a version of the tools that will work with VS2005, but other than saying the tools will have PL/SQL debugging (the current release doesn't) they have been pretty vague about what it will have and have not explicitly announced anything in terms of integration with VSTS.
In using the VS2003 version of the tools I have been pretty disappointed - they billed this as a Production release of the tools and while they do give you better drag and drop for code generation (so for creating data sets and data adapters, etc...) but in terms of making it a one stop place for a developer to do code generation and Oracle development it is seriously lacking (like say a SQL Navigator or TOAD). There is no integration with solutions in VS2003 so no leveraging source code control for source versioning, no way to explain plan a query, they tried to let you leverage Intellisense and code collapse and other nice things in the environment, but I have found them to be very buggy. Probably my favorite part is that they have made the Oracle docs for SQL and PL/SQL into VS Help files and while pressing F1 to get to a section is supposed to work (and doesn't, at least hasn't for me) in the least you can go to the contents and find what you are looking for which is faster for me than going to the web.
