Yep, SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 is now live.  This service pack includes a HUGE amount of changes from Microsoft.  It really should be a new release it is so big.

Download Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - Its a bootstrapper than then downloads a larger set and takes a while to run...

Major new ADO.NET Features

Well the big deal from our standpoint is the Entity Framework!  We are well underway with our provider and are very excited to now we working with live bits that we don't have to worry about changes.  The API is fairly robust, but it is only the start of what Microsoft has in plan for the framework.  People who say it is a poor ORM have not read through the roadmap.  It is much, much more than an ORM.

VistaDB Provider?

Yes, we are working on our VistaDB Entity Framework provider.  All current subscribers will be given beta access once we feel it is far enough along. 

So, where are we?  Well, there are a lot more changes than we originally thought.  We have moved the core engine to 3.5 (it appears to be a requirement for a provider) and all is running well.  Once we started implementing the schema generation tools we got a good chuckle out of our lack of SQL Schema support.  In order to run the provider you do not need SQL strings, but to get the schema you still have to give the provider framework a SQL query it can run to get what it needs.  This provided to be quite a bit more than we have originally expected.  But it also means that our schema query ability under SQL will be improved (a good thing).

Our current goal is to have the Entity Framework provider out by the end of the year.  This is a big undertaking and we will be blogging about it a lot over the coming months.  You see there are these little things about typing and generics that have really gotten a bee in our bonnet.

Types and typing

While doing the schema routines for the Entity Framework we discovered some unpleasant side effects with some of our VistaDBTypes.  The problem is that they are almost all classes rather than structs.  So what you say?  Well, it is complicated but it leads to reference counting issues due to them being held as reference types in memory.  Turns out this is a bad thing for the GC and for performance within the Entity Framework.  So we are making a few more detours along the way...  Um, refactoring I mean.  We will post some more about this in the coming weeks.