Visual Studio 11 beta - Tooling for SQL Server Compact

Visual Studio 11 beta includes SQL Server Compact 4.0 SP1 CTP1, as I blogged about here. In this post, I will describe in greater detail the tooling support included with Visual Studio 11 beta. Notice the Visual Studio 11 is in beta, and things can change before release.

Visual Studio 11 beta only supports SQL Server Compact 4.0 in Server Explorer and other tools, so no longer support for 3.5 SP2, for development with that, you can still reference the 3.5 DLL files, but will not get any built-in tooling support.

This also means, that the EDM Wizard now only supports 4.0, so no longer the confusing mix of 4.0 support for Web projects, and 3.5 support for other project types.

The Transact-SQL Editor in Premium and Ultimate, that previously supported SQL Server Compact 3.5 and 4.0 now only support SQL Server, sadly. So in order to analyse SQL Server Compact queries, you must have SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Studio Express  (which is a free product) installed.

The Server Explorer is “missing colours”, but otherwise looks familiar:

The Server Explorer dialogs for SQL Server Compact, that were previously available, look very much the same!

And you can still add a “Local Database”, which creates an empty SQL Server Compact 4.0 database in your project:

The SQL Server Compact Toolbox also works with Visual Studio 11 beta, notice that is also support connections to 3.5 database files!