Mindscape has announced a new version of their dot net ORM tool named Mindscape LightSpeed 3.  Version 3 includes support for VistaDB 4 and a lot of other new features.  Priced at only $199 per developer (source is available for an extra fee) LightSpeed is a very cost effective tool to add to any developers tool belt.  There is also a free version available for databases with less than eight tables if you just want to take the product for a test drive.

We recently spoke with John-Daniel Trask of Mindscape about their new release, and adding support for VistaDB 4.

What is the minimum version that supports VistaDB?  What version of VistaDB?

All current versions of LightSpeed support VistaDB 3.x. Support for VistaDB 4 was added for LightSpeed 3.0. It’s important to note that unlike other object relational mappers, the support for databases goes beyond the core mapping framework – we have full visual designer support integrated into Visual Studio. LightSpeed has supported full schema round tripping for some time which means developers can migrate changes they have made to their model down to the database AND from the database up to the model, depending on how they prefer to work.

What is the experience for a new developer using your product?

When a developer is targeting VistaDB but they still want all the benefits of an object relational mapper, then LightSpeed is the answer. We have aimed to provide more than just the core mapping framework and try to give developers a fantastic end to end experience. With the Visual Studio designer a developer can literally be up and running with their data model in under 10 minutes. They can be even more product with LightSpeed 3.0 which can create and manage database schema migrations automatically – saving valuable time from writing SQL migration scripts manually.

We have a great getting started video which demonstrates the first user experience. In the video we target SQL Server however the experience is identical across most underlying database engines.

What was your reason for adding VistaDB support?

We received requests from new users who wanted to work with VistaDB and who also wanted to use LightSpeed. We added support and now have many more happy VistaDB users using LightSpeed for their data access and domain modeling needs.

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I have gotten a lot of questions from Silverlight users wanting to know if VistaDB will be able to load in Silverlight 4.  This would be a great thing if you could actually have a client side database in a Silverlight app.  I still am not 100% convinced this is a good idea in most circumstances, but for offline Silverlight apps this would definitely make sense.  It would allow you to store data locally in isolated storage on the users machine, and then send it to the server when they next are online.  The typical airplane offline app scenario. 

Nope – Not really using .Net

The short answer – NO.  Silverlight 4 can load “some” assemblies, but nothing built for .Net 4 or .Net 4 Client Profile. 

I built a .Net assembly as a .Net 4 client profile, and then wanted to load it in a Silverlight app.  This is the dialog you will see when you attempt it.

Hmm, can’t I just target Silverlight within my current Visual Studio solution?  No.  You have to build a new Silverlight assembly.  I tried this and was surprised to see the namespaces loaded in a Silverlight control assembly by default.

You can’t load any desktop assemblies into the Silverlight assembly, you have to work with the Silverlight subset of the framework.  You can’t do things like ADO.NET, you can’t even implement the interfaces because they don’t exist.  Why not let them exist, but not allow them to load due to platform restrictions?

Custom built Silverlight assembly you can load from your .Net app?

Take a look at the using statements at the top of a Silverlight control library.  Hmm, notice anything strange?  Maybe that everything is in the System.Windows namespace?

Why aren’t these API’s called Microsoft.Silverlight.xxx?  Or even System.Silverlight.xxx?  Most of these have nothing to do with Windows (the Operating System or User Interfaces).  I know many of them come from the WPF included in .Net 3, but they don’t use the same runtime anyway. 

According to this blog post about assembly import in Silverlight 4, there are only 5 dlls you can include within your assembly.  Note that none of this implement things like ADO.NET or even most of what an API would need to work with local data.  I personally do not consider object serialization to be a viable data store, not even close.

For SL 4 and .NET 4, we have made the following assemblies portable:

• Mscorlib
• System
• System.Core
• System.ComponentModel.Composition
• Microsoft.VisualBasic

Hmm, looks like a very small subset of .Net indeed.  Nothing like the “run .Net 4 assemblies” I was expecting after reading the posts previous to this one about assembly loading.

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Seeing as how Dot Net 4 is out already in preview form, and slated for release in March I think it is about time for us to start thinking about our strategy for Dot Net 4. What are your companies doing?

Any plans?

Does your company have any plans around .Net 4?  Thinking about it?  Don’t care?

Some options

• Continue with your existing 2.0 app since 4.0 apps can load your assembly.
• Upgrade the 2.0 code to 4 since 2 will not always be present on the runtime, but then how much refactoring do you do to take advantage of new things in Dot Net 4?  Optional params could help API writers a lot by removing all those overloaded versions of the calls.
• Wait and see what your favorite tool vendors are going to do and then plan afterwards
• Investigate the new release and see what new features might help you improve your product and schedule out only those.
• Should you build 2 assemblies?  A Dot Net 2 for legacy apps, and Dot Net 4 for current apps?  Is there really going to be an early adopter market for .Net 4 only tools?

Reading and thinking

Right now I am reading and thinking about what I read and watch online.  Other companies that I talk to say they want to be there first just to cut off their competitor.  Well, Microsoft will be there before us (built into the framework), so that doesn’t work.

A few said they would recompile their existing codebase to run on 4, and ship a 4 version with only that recompile (if it will work).  I think this is sad, but am also sure it will happen a lot.  Just to get something on Dot Net 4 there will be many who cross compile and work out the issues.

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Our blog uses the excellent Dot Net Blog Engine as our blogging platform.  You can use VistaDB as the backend store quite easily.  Al Nyveldt’s blog has some great posts about setting up and configuring VistaDB with Blog Engine, but they are all for VistaDB 3.x. 

Upgrading to VistaDB 4

The Dot Net Blog Engine knows how to load provider factories, so it is quite easy to update the configuration to talk to VistaDB 4.  I did these steps on our blog a while ago and everything has continued to run smoothly.

The following are the steps you have to perform in order to switch to using VistaDB 4 engine with the Blog Engine 1.5 release.

• Upgrade the database
• Alter the web.config with new values
• Put a licenses.licx in the root directory
• Compile the runtime license in Visual Studio
• Put the runtime license (App_Licenses.dll) and the VistaDB.4 dll in your bin folder

Upgrade the database

If you already have a blog up and running grab the BlogEngine.vdb3 and use the Data Builder to upgrade the database.  Change the name to BlogEngine.vdb4 as a part of the upgrade.

Web.config Changes

The following lines need to be added / updated in the web.config.  They should already exist if you followed Al’s setup for 3.x previously.

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Yep, BETA 2 is now up.  Read the full post from ScottGU’s blog post about VS 2010 and .Net 4.

Download VS 2010 Beta 2

Visit the site to download – MSDN available Oct 21

Ultimate, Professional, etc

Yep, they are now going to ship Visual Studio with naming like the Operating System.

• Visual Studio Express: Free Express SKUs for Web, VB, C#, and C++

• Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN: Professional development tools as you are used to today with the addition of source control integration, bug tracking, build automation, and more. It also includes 50 hours/month of Azure cloud computing.

• Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN: Premium has everything in Professional plus advanced development tools (including richer profiling and debugging, code coverage, code analysis and testing prioritization), advanced database support, UI testing, and more.  Rather than buying multiple “Team” SKUs like you would with VS 2008, you can now get this combination of features in one box with VS 2010. It also includes 100 hours/month of Azure cloud computing.

• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN: Ultimate has everything in Premium plus additional advanced features for developers, testers, and architects including features like Intellitrace (formerly Historical Debugging), the new architecture tools (UML, discovery), test lab management, etc.  It also includes 250 hours/month of Azure cloud computing.

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