Gert Drapers, the PM for Database Professionals announced that the first set of Power Tools should be released by the end of this week. With that in mind I wanted to blogging about some of the cool new features. Today's blog is on the new Regular Expression builder.

This allows you to choose your regular expression and and preview the result of the expression! Very cool. Here's a tip to add to the list of regular expressions:

Navigate to the AppData\Roaming Folder (this will be different depending on what O/S you're using - for Vista it's C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Roaming) and you'll find a file called RegExHelperConfig.xml.

Add a new record (for example, to add something simple like area code) with the following:

<Record Key="21" DisplayName="Area Code" Regex="[0-9]{3}" />

You can also add a new element which shows up when you click the Insert Element button by inserting a record in the syntax element section of this same file. Then you can distribute this file to all of your developers and they'll have the updated contents!

I believe that at the end of september (I didn't get an exact date from Apress) a Second Edition of Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System will be released with approximately 100 new pages of content devoted just to the Database Professionals Edition of Team System.