I'm now working on a project where we are building a couple of Entity Services/Data Services, all of them having their own database (of course). When setting up this projects, we decided to use Team System for Database Professional (Datadude), mostly to get the possibility to get good source control of all things that goes into a database, and also for the possibility to write unit tests and use the feature to load test data. Datadude also offers schema and data comparison, but that is a feature we're already used to from red-gates tools.

I'm not prepared to write about pros and cons yet. We have had quite a few issues, but I will give it a little bit more time while we are learning. If you plan to start using Datadude, I've got a tip, that you most likely need to use, at least if you are more than one developer, working with the solution that contains the Datadude project.

Every once in a while you will have to delete the .dat file (located where your project file is), and maybe also your local database, that is created by Datadude to do validation. I think that the .dat file contains cached information, and when another developer makes changes (for example renaming a table) the validation fails so the project is not able to build. This is because the file and/or the database gets out of sync with the project, but it can be easily fixed by deleting the .dat file, and if that doesn't work, delete the .dat file and your local database. UPDATE: Deleting the database is the same as deleting it from SQL Express (if it's still there) and the file from disk. After this you will have to close Visual Studio and then reopen the project.

We have also had some problem with Team Build and Datadude. This is caused by the fact that Datadude only contains a Default Build configuration, and it's also always build, even though we set the Release Build to not include the Datadude project. This can be solved by creating a new, empty build configuration for the Datadude project called Release. Maybe Johan will blog more about this.