Customer Sneak Preview
We will start publishing information about our EF provider very soon. I want to urge some caution that as you are learning, so are we. The EF provider is Alpha stage right now. Subscribers will be able to download the sneak peak preview soon, but we are requesting it not be put into production.
We hope that you will all take the sneak preview for what it is intended; a way for you to gain a little inside knowledge and learn as we are going through the process to get it ready for production. We fully intend to continue to break interfaces, make changes to functions, etc during the course of the preview. At the end of this process we will end up with VistaDB 4.0.
VistaDB 4.0? A new engine?
Well, yes and no. We REALLY wanted the 4.0 to include all of the server changes, but it is not going to happen. We are breaking public interfaces in the engine, and making lots of changes internally to add more strongly typed internals. It is not a complete engine redesign, but it is a major step forward from 3.4.
The VistaDB Entity Framework provider is a new extension to the database engine. It sits outside the VistaDB.Core namespace and runs on Dot Net 3.5 SP1. But we are going to maintain the Dot Net 2 engine as well. There will be a VistaDB 4.0 (Dot Net 2) and VistaDB (Dot Net 3.5) version of the runtime. They are functionally the same with the exception of the Entity Framework provider.
The VistaDB 4 Dot Net 3.5 engine has the Entity Framework hooks in place and allows the EF Designer from Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to build Entity Models and call our EF provider. The runtime environment will require 3.5 SP1 installed. This is not an option for some customer targets, so we will continue to make a Dot Net 2 runtime engine.
The VistaDB 4 Dot Net 2.0 engine will not have Entity Framework hooks (it can't). It will work with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 (with or without service pack 1). This will continue to be able to be deployed into current environments. We are doing this to ensure current customer targets are not forced to upgrade to 3.5 until you make the decision to change your binding.
We will ship both of them to current subscribers and you will have the ability to choose which to use in your projects and deploy. Obviously if you are using VS 2005 and Dot Net 2 only you will have to use the Dot Net 2 version of the runtime engine.
Side by side?
Can you Side by Side deploy both engines? Absolutely. In fact in Visual Studio 2008 both are installed by default and you can choose along with your runtime target (2/3.5) which engine runtime target you desire.
Data Access Technologies Available
VistaDB 4 will now offer three different technologies for accessing your data. They may be freely used within the same application (you don't have to limit yourself to a single technology in your app).
If you target the 3.5 Framework you have the following available:
- VistaDB Direct Data Access (DDA)
- ADO.NET Provider (SQL)
- ADO.NET Entity Framework
As an example, let's say you use DDA to create your blank database and populate your initial data at application startup. You can still use the Entity Framework as your ORM tool within the main portion of your application. In our online Account Manager we use a mixture of SQL and EF code to manage the systems. In some cases it was just simpler to perform some tasks using known tactics rather than figure out how to do it purely within EF. The point here is that you are free to choose within your application.
If you target the 2.0 Framework you have the following available:
- VistaDB Direct Data Access (DDA)
- ADO.NET Provider (SQL)
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