Data Types supported in visual studio 2008

Question

I just downloaded and installed the latest Adventure Works database from http://www.codeplex.com/MSFTDBProdSamples/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=16040 to do some more playing around with LINQ and found that there are some data types that are not natively supported within Visual Studio 2008. I get the "One or more selected items contain a data type that is not supported by the designer." error message.

I found that the spatial data type is the issue in this case.

My questions are:

• What other data types are not inherently supported by Visual Studio that is in SQL Serve 2008?
• Why are these types not supported?

The second question is I guess the most puzzling to me. I can understand why not all data types would be supported from MySQL, Oracle, Postgre SQL and so forth. I would think that the SQLServer development group, might give a heads up to the Visual Studio development group, you know yell down the hall or something.

Answer 1

According to this blog post it's everything except the spatial types (Geometry and Geography) and the HierarchyID data type.

As for why? Well they release support for most of the types in an update, as per this blog bost by the ADO.NET team, but that's the last LINQ to SQL entry. They seem to be only worried about the Entity Framework now. Who knows if we'll ever see a LINQ to SQL v2?