I am stoked – we finally got LightSpeed 3.0 out the door! For a company the size of Mindscape, we took on a mamoth amount of work and took almost all of 2009 to deliver what we think is an extremely solid 3.0 product.

If you’re interested in the features, you can read the official blog post with highlights or check out the more detailed change log (which incidentally is the same size as all our previous change logs combined).

What I’m really excited about is the integration of migrations into LightSpeed 3.0. Personally I have always hated the pain of having to script out my database changes as I was working away. Even in Rails I’ve not overly enjoyed creating migrations even though they have a nice simple abstraction for them. LightSpeed 3.0 allows you to have the designer track changes and automatically generate the migrations for you. This means you do not have to write a single line of code to have migrations created for you as you tool around updating your model. To me, this is a huge win – we are taking even more work away from the developer so they can focus on solving the actual business problems. I can’t wait to see what feedback we get around this feature

The other exciting aspect of the migrations tracking is that it moves LightSpeed up the value chain – we’re no longer “just an ORM”. With LightSpeed 2.0 we delivered a cool designer will full schema round tripping for heaps of different databases. That was an awesome performance boost for developers and really helped folks working with their models. The migrations capability moves us even further up that value chain by helping manage the life-cycle of the database for developers.

There is of course far more to LightSpeed 3.0, but I wanted to share my thoughts on one feature that I think will really boost my productivity going forward

Download the free express edition and let me know what you think!

1st December – Wellington
2nd December – Christchurch
3rd December – Dunedin
8th December – Tauranga
9th December – Auckland

Along with me in the afternoons will be a session for developers on how to get started with Azure. So if you’re keen to learn about what’s coming up in the world of Microsoft development then come along

The events are free and you can register and find out more on the unplugged website.

– JD

This blog will still exist and be used but I’m going to be covering more general technology stuff here. If you like tech, stick with this one. If you like business grab the other one. Ideally grab both – all the cool kids are doing it!

My first post on the other blog covers the initial start of Mindscape – what I was thinking prior and how we kicked things off. I appreciate any feedback you have for ongoing topics on either blog.

Ah, blogging on a Sunday night – it’s actually a great way to wind down the weekend.

Cheers,

– JD

Yesterday we shipped our WPF Flow Diagrams product – a really nice component for creating beautiful flow diagrams in your applications. They can be interactive, read-only, exporting to PNG/JPEG/BMP, serialized, deserialized, customised with new node types, and a whole heap more.

When we release a product I always like to put up screenshots (something that was hard with LightSpeed 1.0 since it was just an assembly at the time!). We also try to show some corporate personality is put up one or two fairly absurd but fun screenshots. Ivan has taken the cake this time with his flow diagram highlighting the mating rituals and life cycle of Penguins. Not to mention his awesome over the top use of WPF 3D to show a diagram tilted and with spotlights flashing (unfortunately the flashing isn’t visible in a static image, but it looks great when you do see it – especially since you can edit and work with the flow diagram while all that’s going on!).

If you’re developing a modern application and need a sexy WPF Flow Diagram, check it out I appreciate any feedback.

– JD

Published on the New Zealand Herald Website:

Mindscape was founded in February 2007 by John-Daniel Trask, Jeremy Boyd and Andrew Peters with the intention of creating software products that “didn’t suck”. Tired of software feeling slow and bloated, they set about creating the tools that they, as software developers, would love to use tools that were small, blazingly fast and effective.

Recognising the skills of the founders, Microsoft got in touch with Mindscape and enlisted their help to develop BackgroundMotion a technical best-practice open source application to aid other .NET developers worldwide in understanding how to best architect modern Web 2.0 websites on the .NET platform. This initial development work helped aid early profitability on top of the small seed capital the founders had provided at launch. Since this time Mindscape has released three products for software developers, continued to grow profits and revenue and has customers all over the world – including Fortune 50 companies.

Mindscape has achieved all of this with only three full-time employees and no external funding. They’ve been profitable since inception and continue to develop both the product and consulting sides of their business.

One of the *biggest* costs to web development, in my view, is the cross browser compatibility work. Internet Explorer is the prime offender here because of older versions that are still in use. To be fair, we all know that if Microsoft aggressively pushed updates, like Mozilla do, they would get in legal troubles. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Personally I think IE updates should be forced upon people just to reduce the massive global waste of development effort that goes into cross browser support but perhaps that’s my view of the world

Grab this free tool, install it and hopefully you’ll find cross browser development much easier!

Download IETester Here

FireBug

What would any list of Firefox extensions be without FireBug? If you’re using the Web Developer Toolbar then it’s time to move on up to FireBug. FireBug just makes web development so much easier with features like JavaScript debugging, providing network data, giving you in depth style information and a whole lot more. I’m sure a small book could be written on this fantastic tool so I won’t go on too much about it.

FireBug homepage

HttpFox

Every now and then the network monitoring ability of FireBug lets you down. It’s powerful but not superman tough by any means. Enter HttpFox. HttpFox is a much more powerful network monitoring add-in which will provide you with truck loads of information about what’s going in and out of your browser.

One annoyance with FireBug is the need to force a re-post of values to see what the response to a POST action was. This is where HttpFox helps out – it just does everything all the time. Good Times. Thanks to Jeremy for pointing me in the direction of this great add-in.

HttpFox Homepage

S3Fox

You’re storing your data on Amazon’s S3 service right? No? Well perhaps you should. S3 is a great services for storing large amounts of data and making it available on the web in a very inexpensive manner. The downside is that tooling support is somewhat limited which is exactly the problem that S3Fox resolves.

Once installed it’s like getting a file explorer for S3 right inside your browser. Manage ACL’s, upload files, do everything you need.

S3Fox Homepage

TwitterFox

Lots of geeks are on twitter but it can be time suck. TwitterFox nicely integrates into FireFox and means you don’t need to sit there on the Twitter site or with a dedicated application running. Every now and then it pops up and shows recent tweets which is handy. Saves the whole “oh, I best go refresh the page!” syndrome.

TwitterFox Homepage

I hope that helps – if you’re on twitter then feel free to add me here. Also, if you’re new to my blog then why not subscribe to my rss feed?

I’m looking forward to Starcraft II coming out, whenever that is, and spied this updated screenshot recently (click to see full sized view):

Notice that it’s raining. Previously in Starcraft there were no weather effects so this is a nice addition. One thing still bugs me though – why not create a shine map so that when it’s raining things look wet? It seems like a fairly arbitrary addition if they’re just drawing lines in front of the camera rather that creating a more immersive effect. I’d love to see puddles appear and as units drive through those puddles they create ripples. I’m appreciative that things like raindrops on water could be too computationally expensive to perform but this currently looks like the same rain effect seen games from five years ago.

Nice improvement, lets see Blizzard take this to the next level.

One of the nice things about Givealittle is that it really helps raise the transparency about where your donations are going. You can elect, for example, to only donate to projects where they have to meet their goal (for example – “we want to build a shed” might need 10, 000 – what happens if they never reach their target? In this case your donation can be returned to you and you can be comfortable in the knowledge your donation wasn’t squandered). There are heaps of features and capabilities like this to help make giving more central and accountable to you. If you’re a company by the way, you can get Givealittle gift vochers – good timing for end of year Christmas gifts

I’d love to hear any feedback – either on my blog here or on the site.

You can check out my Givealittle profile here: John-Daniel Trask’s Givealittle Profile.

We still have plenty more things to add and will continue to do so going forward – join today so you can be kept in the loop. Better yet, try it out and help a worthy cause

On the technical front

As this is primarily a technical blog, it’s worth sharing how we created the site.

The site is built from the ground up using the ASP.NET MVC Framework – we’ve been evolving it from about drop 2 of the framework and it’s been great to see the new bits and pieces getting added the framework throughout development.

The entire code base uses .NET 3.5 so that we could access all the great stuff there (including, but not limited to, the fact that ASP.NET MVC requires .NET 3.5). The Views use Andrew’s excellent NHaml View Engine.

Data access and domain modeling was handled by Mindscape LightSpeed – you can be sure that we’re dog fooding our own products here. This made things like entity validation, site search and data binding work very easily and saved a heap of development time.

The site runs on Windows 2008 + SQL Server 2008. The JavaScript library of choice was of course jQuery.

A call to action

There are plenty of great causes already listed on Givealittle – and many more to come. This is an opportunity for all of us to help improve the lives of others by giving to causes you feel passionately about.

Join today: http://www.givealittle.co.nz

Thanks.

Some of you will connect that dots and know that I’m a co-founder of Mindscape, developers of a .NET object relational mapping framework, LightSpeed and think that it’s only because of this that I would write something effectively touting the alternatives to Microsoft’s O/R Mapping offerings. The truth is, we have only seen a surge in sales from the release of Microsoft tools. Primarily I believe this is because developers tend to listen to what Microsoft tells them to use and then they start to explore other offerings in that domain – especially when they need more than Microsoft is providing.

Many choose Microsoft’s offering over ours is simply because of the reliability they have in Microsoft continuing to enhance their product line. Clearly this is not the case with LINQ-to-SQL and those people would have been better off working with a company that not only continues to enhance their products, but enhances them more regularly and offers much more in that product. I can completely understand Microsoft wanting to focus on just one framework – it does seem odd to develop competing products – but I feel it is premature to do this with LINQ-to-SQL given the situation with the EF and the desire for something nice and easy to use that just gets the job done.

Due to LINQ-to-SQL being part of the .NET framework, Microsoft are going to have to keep it on life-support for years to come. This doesn’t mean you should expect much more than bug fixes being added and, reading between the lines, DamienG’s blog (member of the LINQ-to-SQL team) appears to state that future feature enhancements will likely be provided by the community. The community has created some nice enhancements for LINQ-to-SQL to be sure, but this feels like those situations where you find a site by some guy who still thinks OS/2 is going to catch on any-day-now and continues trying to extend it himself to keep up with where the entire rest of the planet is going.

Coming back to LINQ-to-Entities, I have to add that while the current version has been widely panned by those who have used it, I do believe that future versions can only be an improvement. Microsoft has a long history of just continuing to improve a product no matter how poorly it starts its life until it gets to a state where it is fantastically successful. I also personally know a couple of people working on the future versions of the EF and have a world of respect for their understanding in this domain. I would simply implore Microsoft to cease making politically motivated decisions in this space and start doing what’s best for the developers and end users.

To read more about LINQ-to-SQL being put to sleep:

• David Hayden – good summary of managing the market (I’d suggest LightSpeed though David!)
• Ayende – Microsoft Kills LINQ-to-SQL

So where next? Well, you could continue to invest time and effort into LINQ-to-SQL until EF v2 is released and hope the issues with EF are resolved or you could roll over to the Mindscape site, check out our feature comparison, get the free version of LightSpeed and start experiencing the difference