Xtensive – News Blog

LiveUI: new version and new web site

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:59:00 +0000

We are glad to announce new version of LiveUI web framework is out. Besides architectural improvements, it provides such new features as form validation, layouts, trees and Ext JS file uploading.

Visit its renewed web site to check out the demos. Note how they're integrated into LiveUI web site - UI composition is one of the most important features of LiveUI, so there is no IFrame; moreover, original demo modules were not modified to work as hosted components inside the main site (based on LiveUI + DataObjects.Net 4 as well).

You can view C# code of each demo online - ExtJS tree demo there provides code browser.

P.S. Manual is far from completion yet. But there is an introduction now.

New posts in blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:23:00 +0000

The list of posts we published in our personal blogs from the last delivery of our newsletter:

Alex Yakunin's blog:

Dmitri Maximov's blog:

New posts in blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:27:00 +0000

Here is the list of posts we published in our personal blogs from the last delivery of our newsletter. Most important ones are starred by *.

Alex Yakunin's blog:

Dmitri Maximov's blog:

Help Server 2.1.1 is released

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:20:00 +0000

We've fixed several important issues there; moreover, now it automatically switches to scriptless mode when JavaScript is not available.

Updates:

"Content" tab is usable even if JavaScript is turned off
PlainToc.aspx is removed
Memory consumption optimization.

Fixes:

Installer does not properly install web application on IIS 7
Articles inside help files can't be added to <nodes> structure
Articles from help files are not indexed by search engines, if they're added as separate nodes in <nodes> structure
Help files with the same name are not properly indexed by search engines.
Wrong locale decoding for .Chm files
Garbage information can be extracted from binary TOC of .HxS files
Invalid plain index can be extracted from .HxS files
"Loading..." is showing before loading process starts while scrolling up in "Index" tab
Wait page is showing only for "Search" tab
Invalid content encoding, see http://forum.x-tensive.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=5515.

The updated files are already published in our Downloads area.

This month's offer: free consulting hours for SMB and Enterprise licenses

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:38:00 +0000

If you are planning to order commercial license for DataObjects.Net, right now is the perfect time for doing this:

We grant 160 hours (1 man-month) of consulting for each Enterprise license ordered till Oct 31, 2010.
40 hours (1 man-week) of consulting are granted for each SMB license ordered till Oct 31, 2010.
You will be able to use these consulting hours during 1 year after purchase date.

Consulting implies any works (including programming) related to development of applications on DataObjects.Net. We can assist you in development of persistent model, resolve any issues you'll face or even implement a custom extension to DataObjects.Net.

Note that till the end of this month we'll deliver v4.1 release:

Printable manual & actualized Wiki
DisconnectedState
ASP.NET MVC sample (NerdDinner running on DO4)
Implementation of many other features, such as Prefetch API and local collections will be improved.

100% score on LINQ tests at ORMBattle.NET!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:49:00 +0000

Today's nightly build of DO4 gets 100% score on LINQ tests at ORMBattle.NET!

So currently LINQ scoreboard looks like:

100,0%: DataObjects.Net
88,9%: LINQ to SQL
75,2%: ADO.NET Entity Framework
35,9%: BLToolkit
29,9%: NHibernate

I listed the results for freeware and Microsoft products only. We plan to update ORMBattle.NET scoreboard this or next week.

New posts in blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:36:00 +0000

Here is the list of posts we published in our personal blogs from the last delivery of our newsletter. Most interesting ones are marked by *.

Alex Yakunin's blog:

Dmitri Maximov's blog:

DataObjects.Net v4.1 RC is available

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:20:00 +0000

Finally it's done: DataObjects.Net v4.1 Release Candidate is here.

What's new:

Integrated PostSharp. Consequently, now it isn't necessity to install any third-party tools at all.
Simplified referencing to DataObjects.Net from your own projects. No more install into GAC. Check out how to add DO4 to an existing project.
Oracle support. There are few issues (see this and that posts) that neither we nor other ORM vendors can handle, so we consider them as acceptable ones.
Versions and optimistic locking support. See "Object versions" section here.
Future queries and batching everywhere. See "Future queries" section here; this post shows this in action.
Prefetch API. This post explains how this feature works (see the comments below as well). Queries it sends aren't ideal yet, but they'll be almost perfect when we finish with automatic fall back to IN for local collections (i.e. in a week or so). New API already improves performance of raw fetches by nearly 3 times (shortly it will be ~ 10 more times faster); multiple EntitySet access performance increase is already close to ideal.
Support for local collections in LINQ queries. We don't support IN optimization yet, but this is what you might expect to see on the next week or so. For now this approach is really efficient for collections containing hundreds and thousands of records.
Fully working persistent interfaces. Only [MaterializedView] does not work yet (this affects only on performance, but not on features).
Improved validation API. Now we're supporting IDataErrorInfo; validation-related classes are
refactored to be more usable. Updated WPF sample shows this.
No explicit bindings to Unity and Log4Net. They can be plugged in via Xtensive.Core.IoC.ServiceLocator.
Lots of minor improvements and bug fixes. Check out complete list of changes for details.

We slightly updated our samples:

ASP.NET sample handles concurrent update checks relying on our new Entity.GetVersion() method. To test this, try to edit the same entity from two different pages.
WPF sample got skin and WPF validation support.

There is much better installer and integration with MSBuild:

No need to install PostSharp or something else.
No more installation into GAC, so your bin folders will contain binaries fully ready for deployment with XCopy
We use new way of integration with MSBuild allowing you to make a project based on DO4 fully "XCopyable" - you won't need to install DO4 to compile it on another PC.
There are new project templates - they're much better for beginners
You can copy DO4 to another PC without installer now. Just XCopy it and run Install.bat; Uninstall.bat will remove it.

Notes for v4.X users:

You must modify your existing .csproj files while switching to this version.
We recommend you to uninstall all third-party tools installed by previous versions of DO4 before switching to v4.1. At least, we don't need any of them now.

Personal blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:44:00 +0000

Nearly three weeks ago we decided to switch from product-oriented blogs to personal ones. Earlier I announced this in dataobjects.net blog. For now there:

Below is the list of already published posts.

My blog:

Dmitri Maximov's blog:

Preliminary v4.0.6 results on ORMBattle.NET test suite

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:38:00 +0000

Today we're updating ORMBattle.NET scorecard. And although DataObjects.Net won't appear there, we tested latest DataObjects.Net nightly build (upcoming v4.0.6) on it. So you can compare its results with ADO.NET Entity Framework and NHibernate.

As you see, DO has not degraded at all after getting new batching pipeline (earlier I described it here) - a good sign ;) On the other hand, these tests can't show the benefits of this pipeline. You'll feel its presence only if you're running both query and CUD operations in a single transaction, but ORMBattle.NET tests currently test each operation individually. So let's wait for real-life tests.

P.S. Few days ago we published information about DataObjects.Net code coverage. If you don't track new entries in DataObjects.Net blog, I'm re-posting the link here.

We've launched ORMBattle.NET

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:31:00 +0000

Check it out: http://ormbattle.net

ORMBattle.NET is devoted to direct ORM comparison. We compare quality of essential features of well-known ORM products for .NET framework, so this web site might help you to:

Compare the performance of your own solution (based on a particular ORM listed here) with peak its performance that can be reached on this ORM, and thus, likely, to improve it.
Choose the ORM for your next project taking its performance and LINQ implementation quality into account.

The story behind ORMBattle.NET is published here.

If you read its unofficial launch announcement, you must know we have updated it after that moment:

We run tests on 3 item sequences with different length now: there are 1K, 5K and 30K items. Result for 1K sequence is published on the first page, everything else is in downloads section.
There is online code browser created by Alexander Ilyin on his LiveUI framework. So shortly it will be possible to study DataObjects.Net samples source code without downloading & installing DataObjeects.Net as well.
Finally, there is a blog with RSS/Atom subscription. Since we're going to update our tests & results approximately once a month, think about subscribing there :)

Have a nice weekend!

P.S. Don't forget to digg this.

DataObjects.Net v4.0.5 is out

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:15:00 +0000

After almost 2 months of hard work we're releasing v4.0.5.

What's new:

1. Excellent performance. We've optimized it really well, although you can expect even more - there are still many TODOs related to performance our issue tracker (this does not mean there is something wrong - we simply fix all the good ideas there).

2. Stability. This version passes all our tests in all configurations on Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008, and just one test fails on PostgreSQL (you'll never need LINQ query feature it tests with 99.9% probability). Later we'll share video showing this ;)

3. Better LINQ support. Likely, better than in any other ORM product. ORMBattle.NET proves this.

4. Full ASP.NET support. Use SessionManager and new Web Application project template to build your DataObjects.Net-based web application. So now you can use it in web applications without worrying if there are any issues related to this scenario.

5. Domain modules. As you know, one of key concepts supported by DataObjects.Net is modular persistence & BLL layers architecture: you combine the whole database application from assemblies with persistent types by the same way as combining .NET application from assemblies. And we've made one more step further here: now such assemblies may contain IModule objects participating in Domain build process. They can add custom persistent properties to all the persistent types, participate in lifetime of any Session and so on.

See IModule and this issue to get some imagination of this feature.

6. API improvements. There are many changes related to usability of API we provide. E.g. Key.Resolve() is replaced to Query(of T).SingleOrDefault(...) (Single exists as well), domain.OpenSession(...) is replaced to Session.Open(domain, ...) and so on.

7. Lots of minor updates. Here are just some of them:
- Automatic batching of persist sequences (performance)
- Deferrable constraints support (performance, currently works only on PostgreSQL)
- SessionOptions.AutoShortenTransactions option
- Refactored Xtensive.Sql (now there are just few assemblies instead of ~ 8)
- Optimization of many core structures, such as Key and EntityState
and so on.

8. Alpha version of Oracle provider. Don't use it, currently it passes only 70% of tests :) But actually it is almost ready: we know there are may be just 5-10 issues to resolve to make it fully working. 70% tests mean schema upgrade, persistence & most part of LINQ queries (there are ~ 700 tests related to LINQ) are already working with it. But anyway, don't use it ;) It's mentioned just to show how we're close to deliver it.

9. Lots of bugfixes. Obviously.

If you need details, all the issues related to v4.0.5 can be found in this grid.

You can download v4.0.5 here.

We reached small but important milestone - LiveUI v0.5 is released!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Ustinov) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:57:00 +0000

Hello all,

We are glad to introduce the next version of our promising LiveUI framework.

LiveUI v0.5 brings the following features:

Routing & URL rewriting subsystem.
Testability.
Presentation model pattern based approach.
Full support of ExtJs 2.2 controls library - every ExtJs control has its own comprehensive ASP.NET representation now.
Web Forms module. The same as existing ExtJs Forms but made over pure ASP.NET with JQuery for advanced controls like calendar.
File uploading infrastructure. Completely resolves almost all issues related to uploading.
Various less important enhancements like improvements of client state storage or script generation optimizations.

Visit our demo page and play with the samples illustrating these features.
Browse over the sources. It is really easy to write such an application by you own with minimal efforts. Isn't it?

We hope you enjoy the LiveUI!

Help Server 2.1 is released

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:19:00 +0000

New features:
- Custom TOC icons.
- Localization. Language is detected automatically, currently English and Russian are supported. If you'd like to provide its localization for your own language, please send us [InstallationFolder]\Web\WebResources\WebResources.xx.resx file for it.
- Configuration is fully based on Web.config file now.

Full list of changes is published in Revision History. Updated installers are already available in Downloads section.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) sample for DO4

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:21:00 +0000

Here it is: http://www.x-tensive.com/Downloads/Default.aspx?Path=DataObjects.Net\Samples

What's there:
- Simple Customer-Order model
- Astoria service sharing it
- WindowsForms client consuming it
- Silverlight client consuming it.

Silverlight client screenshots:

WindowsForms client screenshots:

Installation & running:

SilverlightClient.Web:

0. Install Silverlight Tools and Silverlight 2.0.

1. Create web site with IIS Manager, home directory must be SilverlightClient.Web
2. Add Default.aspx to default pages (Web site properties -> Documents page)
3. Set ASP.NET Version to 2.x.x (Web site properties -> ASP.NET page -> ASP.NET version)
4. Add MIME type with extension: .xap and MIME type: application/x-Silverlight-app
(Web site properties -> HTTP Header page -> MIME Types button)
5. Enable anonymous access, disable "Integrated Windows authentication"
(Web site properties -> Directory Security page -> Authentication and access control,
Edit button)
6. Grant NTFS read permission to Everyone group for SilverlightClient.Web folder
6. Restart IIS.
7. Open http://localhost/[YourWebSite] in browser

WinFormsClient:

1. Run Server
2. Run WinFormsClient.

Please ask any questions related to this sample in comments to this post.

DataObjects.Net v4.0.2 is released

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:33:00 +0000

Links:
- Download it
- View list of implemented issues.

What's new:

1. Improved installer

I hope we've fixed the last "big bugs" there. The most annoying ones are:
- 228: "Add\remove programs" issue on installing both DO4 and Xtensive.MSBuildTasks
- 232: DO 4.0.1 installer doesn't update assemblies located in PostSharp directory
- 233: Projects created by project template are bound to specific installation path of DO4

Because of 228 & 232, the recommended upgrade path to v4.0.2 is:
- Uninstall DO4. If the item absents in "Add\Remove programs", just remove its folder C:\Program Files\X-tensive.com (or the installation path you've chosen).
- Uninstall Xtensive.MSBuildTasks, if you have installed it. If the item absents in "Add\Remove programs", just remove its folders from C:\Program Files\MSBuild and C:\Program Files\X-tensive.com (or the installation path you've chosen).
- Uninstall all other components previously required by DO4, including Unity, Parallel Extensions, MSBuild Community Tasks and PostSharp.
- Install new DO4. It will suggest to install just PoshSharp. Everything else is optional now; all Unity and Parallel Extensions assemblies are installed into GAC automatically.

Other changes include the following ones:
- Installer automatically detects & requires to uninstall old version of DO4.
- All required assemblies are now installed into GAC. If you're worried about this, there are .bat files allowing to get rid of them with ease.
- There are new project templates (Console, Model, UnitTests, WebApplication, WPF). But they're only for C# for now.
- New Build.bat files build new DO automatically performing all "before first build" steps. So it's really easy now to make its custom build.

Useful links:
- Full list of installer-related issues
- New installation instruction
- New "Building DataObjects.Net" instruction

2. LINQ

As you might remember, two weeks ago we didn't support 2 LINQ features:
- Group joins
- First\Single(OrDefault) in subqueries (btw, as far as I remember, Single in subqueries isn't supported in EF at all)

Both features are supported now. So now we're fully ready to compare our LINQ implementation with others - a set of articles about this will appear here soon.

Useful links:
- LINQ-related issues.

3. Breaking changes in attributes

We've refactored our mapping attributes once more. Now there are:
- Separate [Association] attribute for associations
- Separate [Mapping] attribute allowing to specify mapping names.
- No more [Entity] attribute - it was necessary just to specify mapping name, but now this is handled by a separate attribute.

Earlier their functions were distributed over [Field] and old abstract MappingAttribute.

We think new version is better: specific (and, actually, more rarely necessary) features require specific attributes.

4. Schema upgrade

We've added Change FieldType Hint. So schema upgrade hint set is ideal now ;)

5. Documentation

We're slowly updating it. As you may find, we restructured our wiki. Manual is organized in step-by-step studying fashion now. Among other new articles, there is new Schema upgrade article - check it out.

6. ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) sample

We've implemented ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) sample on DO4. We decided to publish it separately:
- It isn't really polished yet
- It depends on Silverlight Tools, so we must decide if this additional dependency is acceptable.

It shows an Astoria service sharing entities via RESTful API, as well as WindowsForms and Silverlight clients consuming this service, showing and allowing to change the entities it gets.

What does this mean? You can share DO4 Entities using ADO.NET Data Services, query the service from the client using LINQ, update the entities on the client and send back the changes. Since Astoria client operates on Silverlight as well, you can implement Silverlight client utilizing DO4 on the server.

Btw... We disappointed in Astoria client features. You should do lots of tasks manually there, including registering of new entities, changed associations and so on. From the point of usability it's much worse than what is offered by DO4. So in general, upcoming sync will be much more attractive option for DO4 users. But on the other hand, Astoria allows to implement really simple RESTful integration API with almost zero coding.

The sample will be available @ our downloads section today.

7. Bugfixes

We've got really good results here. Earlier I wrote there are just few failing tests from about 1000 tests for Storage. Imagine:
- About 600 tests are related to our LINQ implementation, and indirectly - RSE implementation.
- All the tests produce the same results - even on Memory storage. This means our RSE execution & optimization engine works as expected.

So the version we have now seems really stable. Good luck trying it ;)

June and summer discounts: join DO4 camp!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0000

We're ready to start DataObjects.Net promotional campaign, and as frequently happens, it starts from pricing. Read this post till the end - we're providing huge discounts in June, but expect your involvement in exchange.

Price & licensing policy changes

This summer prices:

- Personal license: 299 USD (no changes)

- Internal license: 495 USD (-100 USD)

- SMB license: 995 USD (-1000 USD)

- Enterprise license: please request a qoute.

- Upgrade subscription: 50% of the license cost. To order it, you must order the original license with DOUPGRADE discount coupon code. Note that it's applicable only if your exising subscription isn't expired - it expires in 1 year form the first purchase; each purchased upgrade subscription adds 1 more year.

- Support subscription: now included into the cost of license.

- Implementation assistance and general consulting: 320 USD/day.

Discounts in June

First of all, we provide 50% discount on almost anything related to DO4, including:

- Licenses: they cost 150/248/498 USD in June. Quote for Entrprise license is provided by request.

- Upgarde subscriptions: 90/149/299 USD in June (so here the discount is 40%)

- Implementation assistance and consulting: 160 USD/day! This price will be definitely left intact till the end of summer.

Coupon code: JDDO4 - right now it is already included into all order pages.

Huge discounts for the people helping us

The conditions listed in this section will remain intact at least till the end of summer.

1. Promotion help discount: additional 50%.

Applicable to new license purchases only. You promise us to statisfy one of the following requirements during 1 month after your purchase:

1) You start or join, and further - maintain 3 different discussions on such developer's web site or forum as stackoverflow.com (it must be for .NET developers, and be well-known either worldwide or in your country).

The duscussions must be related to DO4 - its particular or upcoming features. We don't expect it must be fully positive - it must be simply honest. And there should be links to our wiki, blog or DO4 section on our web site.

2) If you maintain a well-known blog (well-known - of course, relatively - e.g. in your city; ideally, there must be >100 subscribers), you can publish 2 posts related to DO4 in it. Again, with your honest opinion and with links to us.

Please send the links to such discussions or posts to us - at least, as a proof you accomplished your part of contract ;) We'll join the discussion, if it will be necessary.

If you already did something similar, please notify us, and if we'll confirm the conditions listed here are satisfied, feel free to use the coupon code for this dicount.

As you see, we provide additional 50% discount (= 75% now) in exchange for several hours of your help. The final prices with this discount are:

- Licenses: 75/124/244 USD in June, or 150/248/498 USD later. Coupon code:JDDO4POSTER. Note that you can use it right now, but this implies your agree with the above conditions.

2. Contributor licenses: free SMB \ Enterprise licenses with lifetime upgrade and support

We're ready to provide free licenses, if you'd like to help us to develop or promote the product. What can be done to get a free license:

a) Significantly help us to develop some part of DO - for example:

- SQL DOM / storage provider for the database we don't support yet, or some notable part of it

- Sample application (currently we'd prefer good samples for ASP.NET or ADO.NET data services / Silverlight) or some notable part of it

- Useful tool (anything you miss ;) ) or some notable part of it

- Some other part we're planning to implement.

Expected complexity: if it took more than 10 full-time days, and we accepted the result, we'll definitely provide such a license. But other cases are discussable - we're ready for any proposals like this.

Obviously, it's necessary to discuss your plan with us before starting the implementation.

b) Promote DO4 at your local .NET, ALT.NET or similar user group - by making 1.5 hour overview of it there. You can choose any particular part you want, but ideally it should be based on our videos or on our own presentation of DO (will appear in June).

c) Do anything you want comparable to a) or b) by its effect. In fact, we expect you'll spend ~ 1-2 weeks on this, and the result of this will be attractive for DO users.

Remarks

As you may find, our goal for this summer is to grow up the community around DO4. Prices and earnings don't really matter for us.

But you may ask:

Why are you asking to pay something at all? The reason is simple: paid money is one of factors making things precious for you. We expect they'll make our simple "promo agreements" more important for both sides.

Why now? Because we feel the product is fully ready to be shown to much wider audience. Right now it can do more than e.g. currently available version of Entity Framework. But I hope by the end of summer it will be capable to simply smash it by the set of its built-in features.

Ok, of course I fully understand it won't be easy to compete with EF. But imagine, if EF would be shipped by someone else rather than Microsoft. I admit it would be really hard to get a big niche on ORM scene with its design. Really, they're providing features almost identical to NHibernate, but packed into "Microsoft way" box. It's really hard to identify what's new there. I'd also say this is dangerous for NHibernate as well.

I feel we're combining something very good both from open source and commercial development by running this campaign. I hope it will help to involve the people. Our purely commercial promo campaign will follow shortly - we'll be spending almost 5 times more on advertisements starting from the next week (I'm waiting for completion of a set of vital changes on our web site & Wiki). But your help is more important - just rumors, posts and articles make such products really famous.

So I suggest you to join our community right now. Together we'll go forward much faster. Ask yourselves:

- What commercial ORM is as open as DO4? We'd say even non-commercial are less open. Open source, availability under GPL, public issue tracker, open plans, Wiki that can be edited by you, possibility to contribute.

- Do you expect EF will ever run on open source platform? DO4 will definitely run on Mono in observable future.

- Is there any chance of getting DO4 development stopped during the nearest years, if we were ready to spend 2.5 years on developing this new version?

- Does DO4 differ from competitors? Even the current feature set shows it is. Architecturally it's completely new. Such schema upgrade layer, support for index storages, built-in IMDB, integrated query engine, upcoming sync - who else have these features?

- What features are expected in near future? There are tons of them on the way. You may find the product you see now, although being solid, shows a huge foundation for upcoming features. And that's cool, because the baby is just 2 week old! Ok, I know, but the pregnancy was long ;)

- Are we devoted to DO4? You must feel it worth much more than just money for us. It is a part of our image and reputation.

- Can you rely on it and on us? I hope, yes - taking into account above, as well as the experience (including support incidents) we've got during previous years of work on 1.X-3.X.

Join DO4 camp!

P.S. Even if you already have a license, think about writing something good about us ;)

[The post is copied from DataObjects.Net Team Blog]

Help Server 2.0.5 is out

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:12:00 +0000

GZip compression and Google Analytics-like trackers support are among other new features. Full list of changes is published in Revision History.

Updated installers are already available in Downloads section.

DataObjects.Net v4.0.1 is out

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:09:00 +0000

It is purely a bugfixing release. Full list of fixes we've made is available in DataObjects.Net issue tracker.

Updated installers are published in Downloads section.

P.S. We recommend you to subscribe to DataObjects.Net Team Blog - now it is updated almost daily.

DataObjects.Net v4.0 final is released

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:56:00 +0000

DataObjects.Net v4.0 final is published in downloads section of our web site.

Most important changes we've made last month include:

1. Schema upgrade API. Shortly it will be fully described @ wiki, for now you can try out Upgrade Sample. There are 3 applications representing different versions of the same one. They must be run sequentially except the first one (it recreates the database), although you can try running them in order.

Upgrade API is really simple. To gracefully handle an upgrade, you must:

- Add AssemblyInfo attribute to AssemblyInfo.cs file: [assembly: AssemblyInfo("MyAssembly", "2.0")]

- Extend UpgradeHandler in each changed model assembly - it will assist to upgrade its structures.

- If necessary, override its AddUpgradeHints method and add instances of UpgradeHint ancestors there: RenameFieldHint, CopyFieldHint, RenameTypeHint. Note that upgrade hints are model-level hints, not schema-level.

- If necessary, apply [Recycled] attribute to some of your types and fields and override it OnUpgrade method to implement custom data migration logic from recycled structures there.

All these steps are shown in upgrade sample.

As you may find, UpgradeHandler offers more extension points, and there are schema-level upgrade hints as well. Normally they shouldn't be used - we translate our model-level hints to schema-level hints automatically. But some of them can be useful - for example, IgnoreHint instructing schema comparison layer to skip the specified schema object.

2. Refactored LINQ translator. Almost no differences outside (it passes just few more new tests), but a huge set of them inside. Faster, much simpler and eaisier to extend. Did I mention we're going to support custom LINQ extensions? Well, this version allows us to implement this gracefully.

3. Refactored mapping attributes. Since we've been shipping final, this became rather important. Details can be found here; new samples reflect this. Wiki will be updated in accordance shortly.

4. Improved installer & documentation

- Regular build installer now contains all downloadable prerequisites integrated

- VS.NET project template now contains much less references

- Brief version of class reference is provided @ help.x-tensive.com and installed as .Chm. Full version (.HxS) is integrated into VS.NET help collection.

Other important changes:
- Domain & Session events

- Improved PropertyConstraintAspect - now custom error message can be specified right in the attribute declaration

- New validators. See inheritors of PropertyConstraintAspect.

- We decided to get rid of VistaDB support. Earlier it was easy because of its good compatibility with SQL Server, but now it becomes more and more complex. There are actually many differences - normally acceptable for humans, but making much more complex machine translation for it. Our LINQ implementation and schema upgrade API provide very high level of compatibility between different RDBMS, and this compatibility costs a lot. So we'll focus on more frequently used RDBMS (Oracle, MySQL); furthermore, presence of our own memory provider and upcoming file system provider makes support of embedded databases much less necessary.

Public issue tracker is open

And finally, during the last month we've been using issue tracker on Google code (btw, it is really good). So all we did is easy to expose now: check out "Done" grid for v4.0 final. Previous changes are related to "Pre4.0" milestone, so they aren't shown here. Quicks statistics:

- 25 defects

- 14 new features

- 9 enchancements

- 9 refactorings

- 9 non-coding tasks.

Total: 66 issues.

If you're interested in near future, take a look at similar grid for v4.1. Some features mentioned here (mainly, fixes & tasks) will be separated to v4.0.5, which will be available in ~ 2 weeks.

And as I mentioned, from this point we're switching to monthly release cycle. So v4.1 can be expected in the first half of July.

Help Server 2.0 is out

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:29:00 +0000

Please refer to Revision history for the complete list of changes (it's short, but all items are really important). You can download it here.

Note: we decreased help topic limit to 100 for Express Edition.

Its pages on our web site aren't updated yet (will be done next week), so there are no "Buy upgrade" links. But its User Guide is already updated, and all "Buy now" links are correct there.

P.S. I published first relatively big post @ blog.dataobjects.net.

Announcement: Help Server 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:19:00 +0000

Hi everyone! We're glad to announce we're ready to release Help Server v2.0. This will happen on this week.

What's new:
- Full .HxS format support
- Lucene.Net based full-text search
- Faster startup. Full-text and keyword indexes are built in background now.
- Improved Index tab
- New URL-based query APIs: now you can invoke full-text search and index lookup using special URLs. Both these features are designed to integrate your class reference with conceptual description, manual or Wiki. Check out how index lookup works at wiki.dataobjects.net.

Note: help.x-tensive.com is running on one week old build. We're aware there are some issues. In particular:
- Many pages aren't covered by full-text search
- Index lookup doesn't open the queried page. It should do this, if there is just one candidate.

Certainly these issues will be resolved before release.

DataObjects.Net gets its own blog

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:16:00 +0000

Go to http://blog.dataobjects.net. The detailed description is there now.

New video covering DO4 Console Sample

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:35:00 +0000

Today we've published a new video covering Console Sample of DO4. It concentrates on such features as:
- Database schema building
- Metadata.Type, Metadata.Assembly and Metadata.Extension tables
- Batched key generation
- LINQ to SQL translation
- Running on built-in in-memory database (IMDB)
- LINQ to query execution plan translation (executable RSE providers).

Take a look at it - hopefully you'll enjoy it. Any comments are welcome.

The future of DO4

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Yakunin) — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:54:00 +0000

After writing a short announcement related to the upcoming release, I understood I definitely should provide much more detailed information related to its future. So let's start:

Nearest plans

With v4.0 final we want to:
- Deliver a version that really includes all the basic features developers need.
- Show it is fully stable.
- Terminate the long-long chain of "[not yet working] v4.0 is updated [but is still not yet fully ready for production]" posts in this blog and get back to to the road of real releases.

And in addition, after releasing v4.0 final,
- We'll carefully plan each subsequent release. Its new features and delivery date will be precisely known.
- All the future updates will be logged in revision history. Actually we already switched to a public DataObjects.Net v4.0 issue tracker nearly one month ago.
- I expect further development will go faster. Luckily, now I don't see such big castles to storm as LINQ - at least, in observable future (6 months or so).

Btw, here is the answer on one of the frequent questions I heard during last months: are LINQ and schema upgarde really worth 9 months of work?

Yes.

I really hoped we reached this point in September-October, but was wrong. Frankly speaking, I really thought our internal RSE queries will be enough usable to start, or we'll be able to make them usable enough. But they were not, and all our ideas on how to make them better were looking pale in comparison with LINQ implementation. Moreover, it was supported by some of competitors. As you know, finally we've made a decision to get LINQ support ASAP. This was in the end of November. And from this moment we've been putting more and more resources on getting this done: initial implementation (certainly, quite lacky) made by a single person turned into ~ 4*4 man-months spent on the final implementation.

Comparison with some close competitors (LLBLGen Pro, NHibernate) shows this is definitely not the worst case we could get. Good LINQ implementation requires really lots of time, and for now only few products may claim they support LINQ well enough. In our case LINQ implementation was even more complex: as you might know, our LINQ to RSE translation layer produces real query plans, when it translates LINQ queries for index engines. For example, it automatically uses secondary indexes based on query criterias and statistics.

Another complex part (it costs about 20% of LINQ implementation) was upgrade, and v4.0 implements it really almost perfectly - now you can do all you want without SQL. To migrate your storage to the next version, you need just our upgrade hints and, optionally, your own "recycled" persistent types with all the features they integrate. This ensures your upgrade will be both simple and storage-independent. This is one of the most impressive advantages of new DO. I'm going to create a brief video overview of this feature, it will be available until the release.

Summer goals

#1: Number one RAD framework for database application development on .NET.

This summer we're going to show how to build full-featured WPF and ASP.NET applications (e.g. an issue tracker) on DataObjects.Net in 30 minutes or less.

DataObjects.Net, starting from its first version, was explicitly positioned as RAD tool for database application developers. Now we're going to show it really is such a RAD tool again - but certainly, much more powerful and much less limiting.

#2: Number one RAD framework for N-tier database application development.

The nearest feature we'll bring is integrated storage synchronization. It must dramatically simplify the development of N-tier database applications. Moreover, this summer we'll show file system provider for DataObjects.Net. In fact, a regular database implemented as our indexing engine. It will be initially positioned to be used mainly on the client side, but in future - who knows...

#3: Support the biggest part of RDBMS market.

We'll implement Oracle and MySQL support. Together with already supported RDBMS, they cover more than 90% of the market.

Media activities

This is one of our most annoying lacks. I understand we advertise ourselves quite bad from this point. Almost no articles, rather complex documentation and so on. Why?
a) Frankly speaking, until this moment we had nothing we could honestly write about. "We have really perfect ORM + IMDB, but unfortunately it can't be used in production because it destroys everything on any launch" - LOL, OMG and so on ;)
b) None of us, including me, are good article writers. At least in English.

Everything else seems a consequence of two above facts. No good articles on our web site = no articles on other sites = no exposure. But:
- v4.0 final fully eliminates a)
- b) can be eliminated only if we'll make ourselves to do this well.

If we'll really get b) resolved, we have a good chance to initiate a chain reaction. If not, it doesn't matter how cool is the tool we develop at all. It will sink unknown.

So what we'll do:
- Get #1 goal (full-featured application done in less than 30 minutes) implemented ASAP. This must be really impressive.
- Publish good video covering samples and features of DO4. I hope to finally get the production rate of our "home video" to one file per week at least.
- Eliminate most of the "red links" in our Wiki.
- Publish short articles covering interesting topics lying around ORM tools. For example, comparison of ORM framework performance, implemented LINQ features, discussion of verious features and approaches. Certainly, we'll be mostly on our own side. But if someone of our customers will decide to use the material to write and and publish an article e.g. at the CodeProject.com, we'll definitely favor this.