Wow, it has been 120 days (4 months) since I took over VistaDB. It has been an amazing ride, and I want to thank all of you for your continued support and feedback. We continue to exceed my expectations in some areas, and fall short in others. I think that is pretty normal for any complicated development effort.

14 Releases, 113 Tickets

Fourteen releases since I took over. Things are definitely shaping up with our bug tracking, fixing, and release cycle. We have also been meeting our goals for new features and design efforts. FogBugz has helped us along the way to track and implement fixes quicker in most cases. I am still not 100% happy with the features, but it is better than what we had before. And FogBugz is preparing a new release that I hope will include some new features. The biggest thing we are still missing is a knowledgebase of tickets that have been solved that is searchable if the ticket is marked as public. Fogbugz does not have a way to do this yet, I hope they address it or we may have to look at another solution.

What is coming next?

Version 3.1 is in the works as I write this. We are firming up features and design changes, and trying to squeeze in as much as we can. I am sure some of it will slip to the next version, but we always want to get in as much as we can. I plan to write a separate entry just about the 3.1 release and where we are going later.

LINQ and Visual Studio 2008?

LINQ is still on the table, and very much in development. In fact it has slowed some other things down as we grapple with the new technology and work with Microsoft to fully understand the design changes we need to make to support Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ. David Sceppa at Microsoft has been very, very helpful in getting us samples and answering questions. I plan to interview him for a blog entry later about LINQ. The biggest news (I think) is that LINQ to SQL will ship with Visual Studio 2008, but the LINQ Entity Framework will not. Those not following the buzz word list may be confused. LINQ to SQL does not have a provider model, and will ONLY support Microsoft SQL products. That is disappointing in that it confuses users who invest in that technology into thinking they can use it with other providers, when they cannot. The Entity Framework does have a provider model, and it sits on top of ADO.NET 2 Providers. This is good for us, as we are already ADO.NET 2 Provider compliant. This is also good for us because it does not require the use of a SQL backend. We could (in theory) use our DDA access through the Entity Framework to provide database access.

That would be unique because we could drop a lot of the strings associated with SQL code. But, and this is a big one, it will not ship with Visual Studio 2008. This is very, very sad to me. It means people will get Visual Studio 2008 and start to look at the LINQ framework and possibly implement the LINQ to SQL architecture. Then for them to move to VistaDB would mean a totally rewrite of their code (yuck). I really wish Microsoft would ship them together, but who am I? We continue to work through the new provider model with Microsoft and will release a beta Entity Framework driver as soon as the Provider model gets solid enough to release something. The current public bits you can download do not work with the latest Visual Studio 2008 Orcas beta. I think that is to be expected during this beta cycle, but it makes it hard for us to ship a beta driver to people if they can’t load it! I am still pumped about LINQ and think the future of database development will be LINQ driven. The Entity Framework will help abstract you more from the Database Provider, and more to your language of choice (VB.Net or C#). Gone will be the days of writing Insert, Update and Delete statements (ahh, bliss). If you are even remotely interested in the technology, or just want to read up on it there is an excellent book from Microsoft Press; "Introducing Microsoft LINQ", Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo. It covers the basics and some of the why behind the design. I found it to be an excellent primer on the subject and my copy has been read by at least ten people already.

Another Dog Food Update

We continue to Dog Food our own systems to great success. We have the new trial system up and running fully with VDB3 backend in place. It has served over 3,000 trial users to date without any problems. We are continuing to move other systems over to VDB3 in our backend, but it is taking longer than I would have liked. The online store is the next major system to move, but updating it requires changing the complete reseller system, downloading of updates, serial number generation, etc, etc. In other words it is a much larger and complex system. Add to that the fact that I am moving it to Dot Net Nuke and the progress has been much slower than I would have hoped.

Documentation in moving slowly

Documentation has come along a lot slower than I had hoped. This is mostly due to my own time availability. I am stretched pretty thin and the docs seem to keep getting bumped at the end of my day when I am tired. Add to that the dozen or so articles I am writing, and the sample apps to go with that and progress may seem slow.

How are we doing?

I really appreciate the feedback and posts on the forums. It is very gratifying to us as a team to get feedback from users. We know we cannot possibly test every combination of ways to use the product, so you may run into things we have not seen before. Our promise is to help you work through them, and get fixes out quickly when we find problems. I think to date we have done pretty well on getting releases out in a timely manner, and addressing issues as they come at us.

Looking Forward

The next 6 months will be a very exciting time for all of us at VistaDB. We have a very aggressive development schedule planned, and a lot is happening in the development community as well. The TSQL Stored Procs is going to be huge. I think this feature has the largest potential to bring new people who are interested in "kicking the tires" and seeing what we are all about. Microsoft Sync Services is another exciting technology that will help PocketPC and loosely connected applications tremendously. Microsoft has a good solid beta out the door right now and we are testing it now. I think this technology will also expand how you think about backups and connections of your data across your application. There are a lot of subtle ways you could use this technology to push read only datasets, or to push order entry type apps from laptops or PocketPCs back to a central repository. Not just using VistaDB on the server side, but also pushing data to and from SQL Server.

LINQ will continue to be on our minds and we will post beta drivers as soon as we are able. The technology is one that I honestly feel will propel the entire database industry over the next 3-5 years in a new direction. Object oriented databases have been an odd mix over the past ten years or so. With LINQ it may finally become mainstream.