If you have tried out our new Web Publish experience in Visual Studio you may have noticed that the Update Database checkbox is disabled. See the image below.

The intended behavior of this checkbox is to enable you to incrementally publish your database schema from the source (the connection string in web.config) to the destination (whatever connection string is in the text box). The difference between an incremental publish and a typical publish is that for incremental publishes only changes are transferred from source to destination. With a full publish the first time that you publish your DB schema everything is created, and the next time that you try to publish you will receive an error because it tries to re-create existing DB objects.

The functionality of the Update database checkbox leverages an MSDeploy provider. We were hoping to complete that provider and give it to hosters in time for the release but we were unable to do so. We are working on completing the provider and partnering with hosters to install these in time for the launch of Visual Studio 2012 RTM.

Note: If you are using VS 2012 RC the checkbox is not disabled. It will work if you publish to localhost but it will not work for any remote scenarios.

In the mean time if you need to publish your DB schema you can use the Package/Publish SQL tab (caution: the DB publishing here is not incremental). If you are going to use the PP/Sql tab to publish to SQL Azure then there are some special considerations that you will need to take. You can learn more about those by visiting http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465343.aspx and searching for “Azure” on that page.

If you have any questions please feel free to directly reach out to me at sayedha(at){MicrosoftDOTCom}.

Thanks,
Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi @SayedIHashimi

Cross posted to: http://sedodream.com/2012/06/07/VSPublishDialogUpdateDatabaseDialogDisabled.aspx