VistaDB is integrated tightly into Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 environments. VistaDB is also a fully compliant ADO.NET provider factory that may be loaded through .Net 2, .Net 3.5 SP1 (Entity Framework), and .Net 4. The basic database engine and ADO.NET provider only requires .Net 2 SP1 or higher in order to run, the Entity Framework provider requires .Net 3.5 SP1. Since we are an in process database, whatever version of the .Net framework you target is also used by our engine.
Native support for the Server Explorer lets you connect to and use VistaDB databases as you would Microsoft SQL Server, including visual query creation inside the Visual Studio IDE.
Full support for ADO.NET Provider Factories also means you can write generic data access code and change the connection string to load VistaDB or SQL Server at runtime for a single application build that supports multiple backend data stores.
Our Entity Framework provider works in both .Net 3.5 SP1 and .Net 4. You can generate EF models using with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, or Visual Studio 2010.
Build 14 and higher support Visual Studio 2010. You can generate Entity Framework 4 models, ADO.NET Data Services and more. The only thing you cannot currently do is generate a database from an EF model.
Full support for the Server Explorer also includes x64 systems! Even though Visual Studio is a 32 bit app you can still use our provider with Visual Studio on 64 bit Windows. The VistaDB Engine will JIT to 64 bit when not hosted under a 32 bit process to allow you to take advantage of increased memory limits. While running under Visual Studio the engine runs in 32 bit mode.
Because VistaDB is fully managed we can auto promote from .Net 2 all the way to .Net 4 with no code changes. Our single assembly allows you to decide where you want to deploy the engine without worry.
You can create databases, alter their schema, indexes and more directly inside Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. This allows you to make quicker edits directly within your development environment.
Create a new database while building a connection
Adding a data connection within Visual Studio also allows you to create a new database at the same time you make the connection in the Server Explorer.
Alter tables within Visual Studio
From the project solution you may double click the database to have the VistaDB Data Builder automatically launch and open your database in a single step. This makes for a much faster workflow from the development tool to your database admin tool when you need it.
Please note that Visual Studio Express editions do NOT allow third party add ins to be loaded. This is a limitation imposed by Microsoft. You can still use the Data Builder, and write code to load / access the database. You will not be able to use the integrated Server Explorer plug-in.
You can still write code to use the VistaDB database engine, but you lose the Server Explorer, visual query designer and strongly typed dataset generation capabilities.
VistaDB Lite was designed with Visual Studio Express in mind, since it does not contain the Visual Studio designers. VistaDB Lite is perfect for the hobbyist market wanting to use Visual Studio Express for building ASP.NET websites, or desktop applications.