Niche tool of the day

If you know what a deployment contributor is and have wanted to see what steps were in a plan and have got bored setting a breakpoint in visual studio and using the watch window or something to display the steps in a plan, you might find this useful.

It is really simple, all it does it look through all the steps in a deployment plan and dumps (Console.WriteLine) the steps, any properties it can find and some custom bits like the T-SQL that makes up the step.

If you have no need to see what makes up a deployment plan then it is pretty useless :)

To use it, grab the code from https://github.com/goeddie/DeploymentPlanLogger add it to your folder that has sqlpackage.exe in and append this argument “/p:AdditionalDeploymentContributors=AgileSqlClub.DeploymentPlanLogger”.

If you have lots of steps then it will generate a lot of text, make it slightly quicker by piping the output to a text file and then reading that.

This is only of use when you are experimenting or learning about deployment contributors so not everyone’s cup of tea!

This is what the output looks like:

I wrote it in literally an hour so it doesn’t cover every case but should be enough to get someone started in case this sort of thing floats your boat!