Visual Studio 2012 Database Designer - Has the functionality changed?

Question

I recently installed Visual Studio and SQL Server 2012. I\'m wondering if I\'m missing something because the Database Designer doesn\'t seem anywhere as friendly as the old

Answer 1

We can no longer do queries visually inside Visual Studio 2012. For those who enjoy typing they can type their queries. This makes joining multiple tables a lot of fun. For those who don't like typing SQL Server Management Studio still has a visual query editor. The other option is to use an older version of Visual Studio.

Answer 2

The SQL User Instance designers have been replaced with SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) designers.

Where this is going is that Microsoft is encouraging developers to move towards using a separate Visual Studio project for the database, rather than having it stored as an asset within your application project.

This project system works by synchronizing a set of Offline database object declarations (written in T-SQL) with a physical database during project build.

The replacement designers seem a bit peculiar because they inherit much of their behaviour from those designers used in the offline database projects.

You can read more about SSDT here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh272686(v=vs.103).aspx

Of course, there's no reason why you can't use those Online designers to edit your database: instead of clicking Save when you make changes to an object, click Update. This will apply changes directly to your .mdf asset.

Or perhaps do what I do and simply use SSMS to edit your databases instead :)