In January 2007 I complained about the support for renaming fields in VS Tools for DB Professionals.
It looks they have a good solution for it in their latest CTP (look in the Refactoring section).
I did not find time to install VS2008 SP1 beta in a VM to then be able to install the VSTS 2008 Database Edition June CTP.
They say they do "Preservation of Intent", which I guess it's basically remembering the operations performed in the model (but I hope is something more sophisticated as it looks they got a patent for it).
This kind of approach usually has the problem of handling correctly the scenario where the user undid their actions. For example, a user can rename a column and then rename it back. Being smart about it is not that simple. This time my first test will be to do exactly that. I hope it does not end up renaming the column twice in the target database.
I've used ADO.NET synchronization framework in an internal project and had to give a presentation about it in the local Visual Studio 2008 Launch.
I'm quite impressed with it and with the whole MS synchronization story. The usual demo basically implies changing one line of code and adding three more to switch from an application working locally with SQL Server to one that uses SQL Compact Edition and synchronizes itself.
Using a local SQL Compact Edition database and ADO.NET Synchronization is a very interesting architecture for smart clients.
The fact that you are in a two tier world and you can use LinQ (to SQL, to Entities, etc.) to talk directly to SQL Compact Edition greatly simplifies your code. You don't have to worry about having a coarse-grained service layer, and you can avoid working hard on optimizing the number of roundtrips between the client layer and the domain layer.
Of course, there's the issue of synchronization itself, but the Synch Framework is quite good at it. Handling conflicts is usually challenging but the framework does not add significant accidental complexity to the process, and handling conflicts is a part of every application even if it's an online application. You can do a "last one wins" or have some kind of conflict resolution mechanism based on previous values or timestamps.
Actually, living in a two tier world was one of the reasons that made web development popular. Is was much more easier than building three tier apps.
The fun thing is that we are back in a three tier world. AJAX and Silverlight/Flash applications are three tier, so the shortcuts that we took in web development are not allowed anymore. We need to have a coarse grained service layer to work efficiently.
Or not. I guess it's not far the day where we could use SQL Compact Edition from browser-hosted applications.
I'm not saying it's a solution to every problem, but it can probably be applied to many scenarios.