Using Microsoft.Build.Evaluation to publish a database project (.sqlproj)

Question

I need to be able to publish an SSDT project programmatically. I am looking at using Microsoft.Build to do so but can not find any documentation. It seems pretty simple to c

Answer 1

I had to do something similar to this because VSDBCMD which we previously used does not deploy to SQL Server 2012 and we needed to support it. What I found was the Microsoft.SqlServer.Dac assembly which seems to come as part of the SQL Server data tools (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/tools.aspx)

When you run this on the client machine you will need the full version of the .NET 4 framework and the SQL CLR types and SQL T-SQL ScriptDOM pack found here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29065

Code below is from a mockup I made for testing the new deployment method and deploys a given .dacpac file

    using System;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Linq;
    using System.Text;
    using Microsoft.SqlServer.Dac;
    using System.IO;

    namespace ConsoleApplication3
    {
        class Program
        {
            private static TextWriter output = new StreamWriter("output.txt", false);
            static void Main(string[] args)
            {

                Console.Write("Connection String:");
                //Class responsible for the deployment. (Connection string supplied by console input for now)
                DacServices dbServices = new DacServices(Console.ReadLine());

                //Wire up events for Deploy messages and for task progress (For less verbose output, don't subscribe to Message Event (handy for debugging perhaps?)
                dbServices.Message += new EventHandler(dbServices_Message);
                dbServices.ProgressChanged += new EventHandler(dbServices_ProgressChanged);


                //This Snapshot should be created by our build process using MSDeploy
                Console.WriteLine("Snapshot Path:");

                DacPackage dbPackage = DacPackage.Load(Console.ReadLine());




                DacDeployOptions dbDeployOptions = new DacDeployOptions();
                //Cut out a lot of options here for configuring deployment, but are all part of DacDeployOptions
                dbDeployOptions.SqlCommandVariableValues.Add("debug", "false");


                dbServices.Deploy(dbPackage, "trunk", true, dbDeployOptions);
                output.Close();

            }

            static void dbServices_Message(object sender, DacMessageEventArgs e)
            {
                output.WriteLine("DAC Message: {0}", e.Message);
            }

            static void dbServices_ProgressChanged(object sender, DacProgressEventArgs e)
            {
                output.WriteLine(e.Status + ": " + e.Message);
            }
        }
    }

This seems to work on all versions of SQL Server from 2005 and up. There is a similar set of objects available in Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Dac, however I believe this is in the previous version of DACFx and is not included in the latest version. So use the latest version if you can.