Entity Designer Database Generation Power Pack

05/29/2011: Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Update (v1.2) 

- Fixes compatibility issues with Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1. Tested against Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Ultimate.
- A word on future updates to the power pack:
  1. We will not be adding any future functionality to the power pack.
  2. We are exploring ways to allow the community to add fixes/functionality to the power pack

02/11/2010: Visual Studio 2010RC Update (v1.1) 
Known issues:
1) When cloning a workflow into the project, you will need to set the 'Build Action' to 'None' and clear out the Custom Tool to prevent build errors.

A schema/data migration walkthrough is here:http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2010/02/08/entity-designer-database-generation-power-pack.aspx

This "Entity Designer Database Generation Power Pack" is a standalone download which includes some new database generation technologies. The original Database Generation feature in the Entity Designer is extensible via Windows Workflows and T4 Templates.  This Power Pack builds on these extensibility mechanisms - introducing a new UI to help manage database generation strategies as well as six new workflow options for generating your database. Both the UI and workflows are discussed below.

Team System Data Workflows:
1. "Generate Migration T-SQL and Deploy": This leverages the TSData incremental deployment pipeline to generate a script that incorporates data and schema migration. Note that we don't capture refactoring operations like 'rename' (anything that can't be identified through a diff of the generated database and the existing database). This will be available in future versions.
2. "Sync Database Project": This will try to detect a TSData database project that sits in the solution and 'sync' it with the model. Currently this attempts to discover a database project that has the same name as the model.

Data-Tier Application Component Workflows:
3. "Generate DacPac": Generates a dacpac file (a portable, packaged archive) which is placed in the project directory in the filesystem.
4. "Generate DacPac and Deploy": Generates a dacpac file in the same manner as above and automatically deploys it to a database server. Note this server will have to be SQL Server 2008 R2. This also leverages new DAC Upgrade functionality to perform data migration. As with the TSData migration workflow (see #1 under 'Team System Data Workflows'), this will not be able to track 'renames' yet.

Template-based SSDL/MSL generation Workflows:
5. "Generate T-SQL Via T4 (TPT)": This will generate SSDL and MSL using T4 templates through Table-per-Type strategy. The T4 templates live where the workflows are stored, in %VSInstallDir%\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\Entity Framework Tools\DBGen.
6. "Generate T-SQL Via T4 (TPH)": Same thing as above using a Table-per-Hierarchy strategy.

Workflow Manager UI:
This user interface will now display when ‘Generate Database from Model’ is selected from the Entity Designer. The goal of this dialog is to make it easier for you to manage WF4 workflows and quickly pick the "Database generation" options you want. This allows you to "clone" our default workflows (note that they are read-only in the UI) into editable versions that live in either the user directory or the project that owns the EDMX model. This UI will identify the Strategy, Script Generation, and Deployment options by scraping the workflow file as well as performing serialization. You can also delete, rename, and select workflows for database generation.

The green check mark refers to the selected workflow. When you have modified a workflow's options, the manager will automatically save it. You can then select it for database generation. Select 'Next >' to proceed with the normal "Generate Database from Model" wizard, or 'Cancel' if you just wanted to configure workflows.

When you have 'cloned' workflows to either the user directory or the project, they are fully editable. Feel free to edit the XAML directly in a text editor to add your own activities. Make sure that the assemblies containing your activities are either added as references in the project or are in searched directories (GAC/Visual Studio installation directory).NOTE that when changes are made to a workflow that are manually edited, the Workflow Manager will automatically overwrite the manual changes. This will be changed in the next version.

Finally, there is a WPF-based progress bar which can replace the ‘DDL’ window in the final page of the wizard. This progress bar can be declaratively added within the workflow XAML itself. This can help you identify which stage of the process the workflow is executing in.

Please send your feedback - it'll be greatly appreciated and it will also help us shape the next version of our tools!