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I am working on a project that uses visual studio’s GUI DB designer to draw out a data access layer.
I use mercurial as my VCS, but it shouldn’t matter too much. Whenever I make a change to the DB designer screen in one branch, then another change in another branch, and try to merge the two branches… I almost always get terribly complex merge conflicts that are hard to figure out even by hand on the .cs files that the DB designer generates.
How do you deal with this?
Branching / merging DB differences does not work really well with textual diff/merge tools. There are special tools like ERwin (see http://erwin.com/), which can handle this, but those tools are expensive and will probably be not easy to integrate into your VCS.
I think best option when using the Visual Studio DB designer is to avoid branching completely. Or don’t design your DB using the DB designer. Better have a more or less simple description file for your DB and generate everything else you need from this by a handwritten generator.