When I work with clients and show them how Visual Studio Team System Database Edition can impact their SQL Server development process most of them are very impressed. I've helped several clients get going with these tools. One common concern, when you get past the Northwinds-like databases into large and complex databases is the startup time for loading Visual Studio solutions that include database projects.
There are some ways to significantly tool improve performance. First, if you are using Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals, make sure you install SR1 and the Post-SR1 roll-up releases.
If you are using Visual Studio 2008, these fixes aren't yet available. However one specific fix can be easily performed manually with great improvements on the startup time. When I first read Gert's blog posting on database compatibility level I didn't realize that it would impact project startup performance. However it does!!!! On my test case I was able to cut the startup time almost in half (~8 minutes down to <4.5 minutes). Note that this was a large database with thousands of objects - it did a good job proving the performance improvement.
A couple of final common sense hints... Try to clean up your projects. The warnings and errors slow things down as well. Also, decouple your database projects. That is, if you can realistically have a solution with a single database project it will obviously startup and operate faster than one with a dozen database projects.