In this blog post, we will look into a useful must-have Visual Studio 2019 extensions for database projects that help you in building database related queries and ORM related development with great ease.
Visual Studio is one of the best developer friendly Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The IDE has tons of features that help to ease the development process. These features can be further customized or new features can be added using Visual Studio Extensions. These extensions are available at Visual Studio Marketplace. Here is the list of top 5 extensions that will be discussed in the blog post.
List of Visual Studio 2019 Extensions for Database projects
SQL Search by Redgate
The extension helps you quickly search and navigate across multiple SQL Server database objects. The features provided by the extensions are, quickly find fragments in SQL tables, views, stored procedures, functions, views, scheduled jobs. The user can search using wildcards and booleans and can find references to an object. The same extension can also be used in SQL Server Management Studio as well. The extension has been downloaded more than 135K.
Entity Framework Visual Editor
The is one of my favorites extensions, it allows to see the visual design of the entities (persistent classes) along with the fast and easy way to add new model files. The entities hierarchy and cardinalities like Inheritence, one to many, many to many are cleanly depicted in the visual editor.
A few of the other good features of this extension are the ability to import entities from existing C# source, compiled DbContext from EF6 and EFCore assemblies, generate output from T4 templates. Classes and enumeration are displayed in different color schemes to visually group the model and many others. The extension also has great step by step documentation to get the most from the editor.
SQLite/SQL Server Compact Toolbox
If you use embedded databases like SQLite or SQL Server compact edition for development purposes then this extension will really stand out for you. The extension provides very convenient script tables and data that helps in migrating from SQLite or SQL Server Compact to SQL Server (LocalDB/Express) or SQL Server or SQL Azure via script.
The extension can be used to explore all the database objects, SQL queries can be executed from within the editor, it supports syntax coloring and has built-in support for displaying query estimates and actual plans. The extension can also be used to generate LINQ to SQL classes and much more.
EntityFramework Reverse POCO Generator
This is another great extension that has been downloaded and installed more than 424K times. The extension allows a developer to reverse engineer an existing database and generate POCO (Plain Old C# Class) classes, configuration mappings, and the DBContext class. At the time of writing SQL Server, SQL Server Compact 3.5 and 4.0 are supported.
LINQ Insight Express ORM Profiler
The extension provides very useful features for LINQ and ORM development. It provides design-time LINQ query execution and supports preview of generated SQL statements. It can help in profiling data access events for ORMs like Entity Framework, NHibernate, LinqConnect, and LINQ to SQL mappings.
A few of the benefits provided by the extension are, it fully integrates with Visual Studio and you can view SQL to LINQ queries with leaving the IDE, you can perform Query Analysis, it detects changes in the database context and queries, and even provides variable value replacement and the best of all you can preview generated SQL at design time.
This concludes the post about my list of top must-have Visual Studio 2019 extensions for database projects, I hope you found this post helpful, thanks for visiting, Cheers!!!
If you want to explore all the available Visual Studio 2019 extensions for databases, you can visit the Visual Studio Marketplace here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/
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