Quest Software, Inc., a Visual Studio Industry Partner and maker of Toad for Oracle, has announced the launch of Toad Extension for Visual Studio. Toad Extension for Visual Studio is a database schema provider that will support complete application lifecycle management (ALM) for Oracle in Visual Studio 2010, unifying Oracle developers with the rest of the Visual Studio development team.
Today, support for Oracle development in Visual Studio does not match that of SQL Server, preventing Oracle database changes and development work from being tracked and managed within Visual Studio's ALM framework, according to Quest. Toad Extension for Visual Studio is intended to bridge the gap, enabling developers to perform offline design, development and change management of Oracle in Visual Studio. With the new product, states Quest, all Visual Studio developers within an organization will now be unified under a single methodology, gain the benefits of a more cohesive development team and, as a result, deliver higher quality applications. Visual Studio developers working in Oracle will be able to import Oracle databases; modify and refactor databases; track changes in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server; compare schemas and merge changes; generate test data; and automate daily builds.
"What we see in Visual Studio out of the box is that they have wonderful tools for the SQL Server developer and for the SQL Server DBA to manage the changes from the application team to the database, but it doesn't exist for Oracle," Daniel Norwood, senior product manager at Quest, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The Toad Extension for Visual Studio comes to join Microsoft and Visual Studio in order to provide some of the same features that you will find in Visual Studio for SQL Server on the Oracle platform. The value that we are providing to the Oracle environment is really around change management and reduced SLAs for the application developer team."
With Toad Extension for Visual Studio, he adds, "we now begin to see declarative development enter the picture. For the first time that I am aware of Oracle developers can now use a declarative model."
Toad Extension for Visual Studio will support Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate. Quest will also offer a freeware version of Toad Extension for Visual Studio that supports Visual Studio 2010 Professional, downloadable here within a few weeks of the commercial release. For more information, go here.
Quest Software is showcasing its solutions at COLLABORATE 10 at Booth 1121.