SqlDropDatabase, SqlCreateDatabase MSBuild tasks

When working with SQL, I often find I need to quickly spin up/tear down local developer database instances – for example, setting up a clean environment for integration tests on the build server, or blowing away test data.

To help make this easier, here are a couple of MSBuild tasks I wrote that allow you to drop an existing database:

<SqlDropDatabase ConnectionString="Server=.SQLEXPRESS;Database=AdventureWorks;Integrated Security=SSPI;"                 Database="AdventureWorks" />

… and to create a new (empty) one.

<SqlCreateDatabase ConnectionString="Server=.SQLEXPRESS;Database=AdventureWorks;Integrated Security=SSPI;"                   Database="AdventureWorks" />

It’s also sometimes helpful to be able to parse individual individual keys out of a connection string (e.g. the the database name). This can be very tedious with RegexMatch/RegexReplace, so I wrote a separate MSBuild task to do it:

<SqlParseConnectionString ConnectionString="Server=.SQLEXPRESS;Database=AdventureWorks;Integrated Security=SSPI;">    <Output PropertyName="myDb" TaskParameter="InitialCatalog" />    <Output PropertyName="myServer" TaskParameter="DataSource" />    <Output PropertyName="myTimeout" TaskParameter="ConnectTimeout" /></SqlParseConnectionString><Message Text="Parsed the $(myDb) database on server $(myServer) with timeout = $(myTimeout)." />

Generating documentation with Doxygen

A few days ago, I had my first experience with Doxygen, an open-source documentation generator similar to Javadoc.

After a few hours of documenting my code to a satisfactory level, I had a very professional-looking set of HTML documentation. At work the next day, I used Doxygen to generate code for a Visual C# class library, which had been documented with XML comments.

Doxygen supports most C-derived programming languages including C, C++, Java and C#. It also allows you to define custom pages and sections; you are not limited to code documentation.

Documenting a method is very simple:

/// @brief Calculate the sum of two values.////// Adds the two values together and returns their sum.////// @param[in] aa The first value./// @param[in] bb The second value.////// @return The sum of both values.////// @note This method is deprecated!////// @see operator+()int add(int aa, int bb);

A full list of Doxygen commands is available.