The company will announce Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, a new addition to the Visual Studio 2005 Team System ALM product line. Available as a Community Technology Preview at the TechEd 2006 conference in Boston the week of June 11, Team System for Database Professionals features tools for collaboration in building data driven-applications, Microsoft said.

With the product, Microsoft is attempting to bridge a disconnect between people building applications and people maintaining databases, said Matt Nunn, senior product manager for Visual Studio Team System.

The product provides a foundation for change management of a database schema, he said. "What that means is we're talking about taking the schema of a database ... and being able to take it off-line and place it under version control and manage all the changes that happen to it away from production," Nunn said.

Changes made to the database by database administrators will be known to the development organization, saving software developers from building against an obsolete database, he said.

Featured is a test infrastructure for testing database objects and an interface to write tests in the T-SQL language. A tool called Data Generator enables building of tests that mimic a production system. Refactoring, meanwhile, provides for cascading of schema changes throughout a database.