Before

Working on a project that includes a database implies dealing with the schema changes and versions. The problem is that the tools that can help you are pretty expensive and (from my experience) not 100% reliable. It was so bad that my team and I developed our own database versioning mechanism and even started working on a tool to automate it.

What I want

I want to be able to deal with the database schema objects the same way i deal with the code files - specifically, I want to be able to see a svn history for them.

If you ever had to convince a client or a boss why Agile works, you know that it's not an easy task. Agile goes against many ideas that are considered axioms in the business world - like planning first and then keeping to that plan: "plan your work, then work your plan". If that is the case, these points from a talk by Martin Fowler and Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks) might help you.

In the Plan Driven approach, a project is successful if it goes according to plan, so in software development it depends on requirements stability, on having clear and fixed requirements. As you probably know, that is a luxury most software projects don't have, and a first approach would be to apply techniques like Change Management or Sign In Blood to contain the changes. Unfortunately that leads to unhappy clients and unusable software.

In Visual Studio 2010 you can use xdt transforms to fill the web.config files with the appropriate values for deployment to test or production environments.And it is pretty simple to use:

• - add Config Transforms to the web.config (like web.Debug.config)
• - duplicate the sections with the values you want to customize
• - set the xdt:Locator attribute for the nodes that need to be identified by an attribute (like xdt:Locator="Match(name)")
• - set the xdt:Transform to control how the values are changed (common uses - xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" to update some attribute values, or xdt:Transform="Replace" to replace the whole node
• - you get the transformed web.config when publishing or creating a deployment package (or you can create it from command line).

More details on how to use the Web.Config Transformation here.