We're developing our database with SSDT in Visual Studio 2013. We want to build TVFs with full text search features. Visual Studio installs a LocalDB Server so we don't need to install any other stuff on the developer machines to get the application running. LocalDB, sadly, doesn't support the full-text search feature. Is it necessary to install a different SQL Server on local machines to get my project running?
If not, what is the best way to solve this problem? Is it possible to define different versions of a TVF (or any other db objects) for different server versions? How should we handle the situation, that maybe 90% of the code works for all SQL Server versions and 10% should be written for each version individually? Are there any cool tools for managing this?
You can always install SQL Server Developer edition (runs ~ 50 USD). From there, change your project properties, go to "Debug" and change the Target Connection String for SQL Server from (localdb) to the name of your locally installed SQL Server. That will let you take advantage of the full set of SQL features.
If you need to support multiple versions with a small subset of code, I'd probably look into composite projects. Put the majority of your code that is not edition-specific into the main project and create the edition-specific code into the other/related projects. Jamie Thomson has a post about something like this here: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2013/03/10/deployment-of-client-specific-database-code-using-ssdt.aspx