How could Database Projects and TFS help our dev team?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have just started working with a new company in a very small IT department, and an even smaller dev team (just 2 developers including me). We mainly develop in house web applications for the company.

Now my background is in desktop applications so this job comes with a slight learning curve for me having never developed ASP.Net web applications before. Currently we do not use TFS however I have made the suggestion and it is something we are going to be adopting soon.

I am also considering recommending we move our SQL databases into database projects as currently we do nightly backups to protect the data but all the updates are manual, we connect to the database and execute queries etc.

Im not a DBA but in my last job we were in the process of migrating our databases to database projects and the DBAs seemed to love the idea. What would the benefits and potential downfalls of this be? Would it aid us with updating databases in our live enviroment after development has been done? Obviously we dont want to loose any data but just update tables / Stored Procs etc.

As a side question I have very limited knowledge of TFS, and although we are going to be using it to handle our version control is it possible to use TFS to update our live websites automatically once development has finished?

Sorry if this is quite a broad question, I am attempting to research this myself but I would like to hear from people who actually use the products and do these things.

Thanks