The dt Procedures

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If you've installed Visual Studio Enterprise and snooped around the system tables on your server much, you may have noticed a set of Microsoft-supplied stored procedures with names that start with "dt." Visual Studio uses these procedures to provide source code management for Transact-SQL stored procedures.

A cursory check of these routines reveals that they use a COM object called SQLVersionControl.VCS_SQL. This object is used by Visual InterDev to manage stored procedure source code directly from the IDE. If you've installed the Visual InterDev Server Components, you already have this object installed on your system and could conceivably use the dt_% procedures even without using InterDev itself.

That said, not everyone will have Visual Studio Enterprise, so this chapter will show you how to manage Transact-SQL scripts using VSS Explorer and the COM interfaces provided by VSS itself.

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