Better management of CLR assemblies

Installing, managing and removing CLR assemblies is generally awkward with the standard tools provided by Microsoft: particularly if you have several assemblies with a relatively large number of functions etc. defined in each one (e.g. since there is no easy way to tell which functions belong to which assemblies, and you can't remove an installed assembly without first dropping all the objects defined by it). Keeping consistency and managing version control across multiple servers can easily become a headache. Working with EXTERNAL and UNSAFE permissions sets becomes even more complex unless you're prepared to set TRUSTWORTHY to ON - which is not ideal.

It was to address these sorts of problems - which I encountered regularly while building a set of commercial CLR function libraries, that I created the Assembly Manager tool (www.totallysql.com/Products/AssemblyManager). It started out as a install/remove manager - but I soon found a bunch of other things I wanted to be able to do quickly and easily (e.g. provide in-place version upgrades without having to drop dependent views etc.), so it grew into more comprehensive tool. It's offered as a commercial tool with a 30-day free trial period - if you work with CLR assemblies to any extent please do go and give it a try and let me have your views on it: if you're willing to help us out with a case study on it I can offer a complementary license.

www.totallysql.com