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Azure SQL: How to determine if table was altered or created and by whom

My team works with a large Azure SQL database where several other teams insert and read data from our database. They sometimes need to create or alter tables but those actions should be coordinated with our team and unfortunately has not been the case. We've had a couple scenario's where one of those teams updated a stored procedure. As a result their changes are not under our source control and if we create a local database for development or do a backup/restore we get errors because of missing references.
We are looking for a way to programmatically determine if a table was altered or modified. It doesn't need to be real-time. I considered reading logs and looking for alter or create commands. I've not has much success as the logs are binary and I don't currently know how to parse them. My other thought is to keep a copy of the master database sys tables and routinely compare them to see if something changed. I'm not sure how well that would work or if I could determine who made the change. Thoughts, Ideas?
Please keep in mind that this is using an Azure SQL Database which is a bit more limited than a standard SQL database.

You can use DDL Triggers as explained here.
CREATE TRIGGER safety
ON DATABASE
FOR DROP_TABLE, ALTER_TABLE
AS
PRINT 'Save change on a log'
SELECT EVENTDATA().value('(/EVENT_INSTANCE/TSQLCommand/CommandText)[1]','nvarchar(max)');
Additionally you can use Extended Events to track schema changes. Look at samples here.
Finally you can also see how Azure SQL Auditing may fit your needs.

How can I tell if a database record has changed?

I'm writing a process that will run on a schedule and periodically scan records in a SQL Server database and check for changes to those records. Unfortunately the records in this database are not versioned/timestamped in any way and I can't change the schema because it's not my database. Short of comparing every single field I don't have any idea how to check to see if a change has actually occurred.
Right now I'm using entity framework for all data access, but I can switch to direct queries if needed. Is there an easy way to do this?
EDIT: I need a way to check each individual record for changes, not a database/table as a whole.

I don't think checking each record can work for big databases (it can take forever)
But you could calculate hash for each row and store it in your apps database. Then on every run recalculate hash and compare with what's in your apps db.
Also I know you can't change schema, but maybe you could add triggers to monitored dataabse that will log changes?
Another option could be setting up replication and detecting changes (with triggers as above) in database that receive's replicated data (but I have to admit I never configured replication and I may be wrong about how it works).

If you're using SQL Server 2008 or greater, you may be able to make use of either Change Data Capture or Change Tracking. Here's a link to the MSDN documentation.

Automatically log changes made to records in database

I'm wondering what the best way to implement this would be.
Basically our project has a requirement that any change made to records in the database should be logged. I already have it completed in C# using Reflection and Generics but I'm 100% sure that I used the best method.
Is there a way to do this from inside the SQL database?
The big key is that the way our project works, the ObjectContext is disconnected, so we couldn't use the built in Change Tracking and had to do our own compares against previous Log items.

If you're using SQL Server 2008 or higher, you can implement either change tracking or change data capture directly on the database. Note that the latter is only available in the Enterprise edition engine. There are pros and cons to each method. You'll have to review each solution for yourself as there isn't enough requirement information to go on in the question.
If you're using SQL Server 2005 or below, you'll have to resort to a trigger-based solution, as suggested by the other answers.

You want to look at database triggers.

depending on the complexity of your datamodel you could setup on update/insert/delete triggers on the relevant tables - these triggers could log whatever is needed (old/new values, User, timestamp etc.)... see http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ms189799.aspx

Look at my blog to see how you can track data changes without database scheme modification:
part1,part2

For your project requirement, SQL trigger is the better solution than the current C# reflection. Becaz triggers provides a way for the database management system to actively control, monitor, and manage a group of tables whenever an insert, update, or delete operation is performed. More over, the requirement is full filled at DataBase layer itself and so hosted as the single solution for various front end applications.

Auditing record changes in sql server databases

Using only microsoft based technologies (MS SQL Server, C#, EAB, etc) if you needed keep the track of changes done on a record in a database which strategy would you will use? Triggers, AOP on the DAL, Other? And how you will display the collected data? Is there a pattern about it? Is there a tool or a framework that help to implement this kind of solution?

The problem with Change Data capture is that it isn't flexible enough for real auditing. You can't add the columns you need. Also it dumps the records every three days by default (you can change this, but I don't think you can store forever) so you have to have a job dunping the records to a real audit table if you need to keep the data for a long time which is typical of the need to audit records (we never dump our audit records).
I prefer the trigger approach. You have to be careful when you write the triggers to ensure that they will capture the data if multiple records are changed. We have two tables for each table audited, one to store the datetime and id of the user or process that took the action and one to store the old and new data. Since we do a lot of multiple record processes this is critical for us. If someone reports one bad record, we want to be able to see if it was a process that made the change and if so, what other records might have been affected as well.
At the time you create the audit process, create the scripts to restore a set of audited data to the old values. It's a lot easier to do this when under the gun to fix things, if you already have this set up.

Sql Server 2008 R2 has this built-in - lookup Change Data Capture in books online

This is probably not a popular opinion, but I'm going to throw it out there anyhow.
I prefer stored procedures for all database writes. If auditing is required, it's right there in the stored procedure. There's no magic happening outside the code, everything that happens is documented right at the point where writes occur.
If, in the future, a table needs to change, one has to go to the stored procedure to make the change. The need to update the audit is documented right there. And because we used a stored procedure, it's simpler to "version" both the table and its audit table.

Best way to incorporate legacy data

I am working on a price list management program for my business in C# (Prototype is in Win Forms but am thinking of using WPF for the final ap as a MVVM learning exercise).
Our EMS system is based on a COBOL back end and will remain that way for at least 3 years so I cannot really access it's data directly. I want to pull data from them EMS system periodically to ensure that pricing remains in sync (And to provide some other information to users in a non-editable manner such as bin locations). What I am looking at doing is...
Use WinBatch to automatically run a report nightly then to Use Monarch to convert the text report to a flat file (.xls?)
Drop the file into a folder and write a small ap to read it in and add it to the database
How should I add this to the database? (SQL Express) I could have a table that is just replaced completely each time but I am a beginner at most of this and I am concerned what would happen if an entire table was replaced while the database was being used by the price list ap.
Mike

If you truncate and refill a whole table you should do it in one single transaction and place a full table lock. This is more secure and faster.
You also could update all changed rows, then insert new (missing rows) and then delete all rows which weren't updated in this run (insert some kind of version number in each row to determine this).

First create a .txt file from the legacy application. Then use a batch insert to pull it into a work table for whatever clean up you need to make. Do the clean up using t-sql. Then run t-sql to insert new data into the proper tables and/or to update rows where data has changed. If there are toomany records, do the inserting and updating in batches. Schedule all this as a job to run during hours when the database is not busy.
You can of course do all of this best in SSIS but I don't know if that is available with Express.

Are there any fields/tables available to tell you when the price was last updated? If so you can just pull the recently updated rows and update that in your database.... assuming you have a readily available unique primary key in your cobol app's datastore.
This wouldn't be up to date though because you're running it as a nightly script to update the database used by the new app. You can maybe create a .net script to query the cobol datastore specifically for whatever price the user is looking for, and if the cobol datastores update time is more recent than what you have logged, update the SQL Server record(s).
(I'm not familiar with cobol at all, just throwing ideas out there)