For customers only. If you can please download the ES2009 Pre-Beta in our downloads area and give it a run through and report anything back to us in our forums.

IMPORTANT !!

* Close all instances of Visual Studio

* Uninstall the ES2009 Alpha

* Delete your C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\EntitySpaces folder (will be a different folder on Vista)

* Now install the ES2009 Pre-Beta and go to the "Settings" tab and reconnect to your database
   (THEN PRESS THE SAVE ICON ON THE SETTINGS TAB)

WHATS CHANGED

* The International install issue is NOT FIXED YET but should be by this weekend

* The "Projects" tab is implemented

* Microsoft Access should work just fine

* It should work on 64 bit machines

* The stand alone app shouldn't require Visual Studio to be installed

* The User Metadata is now saved

* Various UI issues tweaked

The reason we are releasing this pre-alpha is to get feedback from you before our official alpha release this weekend. The version number didn’t change, it's still versioned as the Alpha.

From Mobile Devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with Medium Trust requirements, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net

We thought we would share with you what came out of this past Wednesday's EntitySpaces Team meeting which we hold every Wednesday. Our plan is to release the ES2009 Beta on December 22nd. The Beta will be available to customers as a true Developer Version and to the public as a Trial version which will be posted on our download page. In fact, we will encourage new users to go with the ES2009 Beta over the EntitySpaces 2008 Trial version.

The Beta should have full functionality including the Projects Tab which will allow you to record and playback templates (and it's very easy to use). We have fixed all of the issues reported in the Alpha and have made many more improvements.

There are two items that will not be in the Beta that will be delivered in the official ES2009 release. The first being the ASPX Admin Suite. However, once the Beta is released we are going to be giving our full attention to the ASPX Admin Suite and will porting the C# and VB versions over to ES2009 template system and fixing all of the known issues. We know the Admin Suite has fallen behind and is really in need of some attention. Secondly, the ES2009 Command Line utility will also be created which will allow you to generate your EntitySpaces Architecture from the command line. This utility will be able to execute individual templates as well as entire projects.

While we haven't committed to an official release date we have in mind the end of January 2009 as our goal but that is an aggressive date. Once we ship ES2009 we will be free of third party code generators and then turn our full focus to the EntitySpaces Architecture itself.

From Mobile Devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with Medium Trust requirements, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

 

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net

We have re-skinned our main site and we hope that you like what you see. We will be adding more content and changing our menu structure in the near future as well, so more changes are coming. Over the next few months we will be bulking up the documentation on our developer site. This will allow us to turn our main site into a marketing site that will convey the strengths and advantages of EntitySpaces and of course still act as our storefront.

We at EntitySpaces, LLC would like to thank "Ann Chanyoursang" for designing our new DotNetNuke skin. Ann is a designer for AppTheory which is a development consultancy and a member of the Trend Core Group in Atlanta, GA. AppTheory has a unique perspective on DotNetNuke. With Core Team Developers on staff and a roster of top tier clients using DNN, AppTheory is considered one of the top DotNetNuke consultancies.

Thanks Ann, great Job !!

 
 

From Mobile Devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with Medium Trust requirements, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net

We have released our EntitySpaces 2009 Alpha internally to our customers and if all goes well within a week or so we will publish a trial version on our download page for everyone to try. You can install ES2009 side by side with (but not over the top of) ES2008 without conflict. The ES2009 Alpha is really a trial version that is hard coded to expire on Jan 15th, 2009, however we will have a beta version out before it expires. There are no limitations however in the features. You will find it to be very convenient never having to leave Microsoft Visual Studio when you need to generate your EntitySpaces architecture. Our ES2009 AddIn for Visual Studio is compatible with both VS2005 and VS2008. You will also find a stand alone version of ES2009 on your Start menu after installation for those who are not using Visual Studio. Everything in the ES2009 AddIn for Visual Studio is also available in the stand alone version. EntitySpaces 2009 no longer relies on MyGeneration or CodeSmith for it's code generation. We now have our own code generation engine. Bringing everything in-house has drastically removed the complexities involved in downloading EntitySpaces and getting your first application up and running. Once you do that, we know you'll be hooked.

The "What's New" tab will keep you in touch with what is happening in the EntitySpaces community. You can even get to our forums, blog, documentation site, and home page from the "What's New" tab. You can click the "Embed" button and use the hosted browser within our AddIn itself and avoid lauching browsers. Give it a try, it's pretty cool. Of course, you will want to play around and figure out just how you want to dock your ES2009 AddIn depending how you intend to use it. It's nice to doc the AddIn in the center pane and then embed our documentation site on the "What's New" tab so you can use our documentation site within Visual Studio.

We have improved our metadata providers for SqlCe and VistaDB. You should now be able to connect to any version of SqlCe without the need to recompile our metadata provider. See the instructions on the "Settings Tab" for how to indicate what version of SqlCe you want to use. Our VistaDB metadata provider now works with the latest version of VistaDB as well. Our VistaDB metadata provider is compiled against VistaDB version '3.4.3.69'. If you need to run against a different version you will find the solution file for it in the C:\Program Files\EntitySpaces 2009\CodeGeneration\EntitySpaces.MetadataEngine.VistaDB folder. Merely open it up, compile it, and then copy the EntitySpaces.MetadataEngine.VistaDB.dll assembly into your C:\Program Files\EntitySpaces 2009\CodeGeneration\Bin folder.

There hasn't been much work done on the actual EntitySpaces architecture since our November release of ES2008. However, we did upgrade our PostgreSQL provider (EntitySpaces.Npgsql2Provider.dll) to use the lastest Npgsql version, '2.0.1.0'. We would like to give a shout out to the Npgsql team for all of their efforts.

There are some things missing from the alpha that will make it into our beta version. There is currently no support to automatically add the generated files to your solution, however, that is coming. Of course, you can generate the files directly into your solution's folders using the output path on the "Settings Tab". Also, there is no project support yet that would allow to record template execution for later playback, this is coming soon as well. Finally, the template stack is not yet implemented.

Overall, we are very pleased with the quality of the Alpha release. It is very stable as in the EntitySpaces tradition. You should be able to generate your architecture and compile it just fine. We are very interested to hear how the installation works for you. We have tested on both Windows XP and Windows Vista and we hope everything runs smoothly for you as well. Be sure and let us know what can make ES2009 better, any missing features? suggestions? We want hear from you. We have created a special section within our forums for reporting and commenting on the ES2009 Alpha release. Please make all of your posts in this new forum so there is no confusion with our ES2008 posts. So chime in on our Special ES2009 Forum and let us know how your install went and your initial thoughts.

This year is going to be your year. We have taken the first step in making your 2009 the most productive year ever. After the initial release of ES2009 will will focus on the EntitySpaces Architecture itself. We will review our TRAC system for outstanding issues and will put out all call for fixes that you need or features that are important to you.

From Mobile Devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with Medium Trust requirements, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

 

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net

 

We have created a video preview of our EntitySpaces 2009 Plugin for Visual Studio. The video is approximately 6 meg in size so give it a moment to get started. The video has sound and you might need to adjust your volume. We hope that you enjoy this video. It really gives you a feel for what it's going to be like to use EntitySpaces 2009, and it's really nice never having to leave Visual Studio. There is a stand alone version of the ES2009 Plugin as well for those who are not using Visual Studio. Not shown in the video are the Template Projects for playback or generating code directly into your solution.

You can find the movie HERE or click on the movie icon on the right.

 

---

From Mobile Devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with Medium Trust requirements, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net

You may have already noticed our new logo on our recently announced documentation site. You will gradually begin to see it replace our older logo on all content. Also, keep your eyes open for a totally new site. Good things are happening, watch for another blog post on ES2009 this weekend as well.

From mobile devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with medium trust requirements, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

The EntitySpaces Team
--

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net

EntitySpaces Co-Founder Scott Schecter will be in Las Vegas, NV for DevConnections '08 again this year. Scott will be manning booth #608 with AppTheory and giving away some free licenses of EntitySpaces in their drawing. If you are going to be in Vegas for DevConnections, stop by and say hi to Scott. Tell him what you love about EntitySpaces or what you would like to see added in the future. Find out more about the EntitySpaces 2009 visual studio add in or just shoot the breeze. We always love to hear from our customers, and it is exceedingly nice to get to meet them in person and shake their hand (and maybe have a scotch or two;). So if you are going to DevConnections stop in and say howdy. We would love to hear from you.

From the very beginning, we have always tried to provide ample documentation for EntitySpaces. Since all of the team members are developers, we can certainly empathize with using a product that lacks in this area. As the product grew, and more documents were added, it became harder and harder to centralize all of the various resources for easy searching. We, previously, had documentation on our main site, in our forums, and in blog posts.

Today, we are proud to announce the new EntitySpaces Developer Documentation Site. This site will house all EntitySpaces documentation in an effort to provide one centralized, searchable location. We have started consolidating all of our existing documentation there. If you find any content that is out of date, missing, or needs expansion, please create a post in our Developer Documentation forum and we will get the site updated.

We hope you find this new resource useful. As always, any feedback is greatly appreciated.

- The EntitySpaces Team

This post is a continuation of  EntitySpaces 2009 - Running under Visual Studio (Part 1)

Special Note: If you are investigating EntitySpaces this article gets a little technical. However, you will not have to write user controls or do anything other than browse to a template within Visual Studio and execute the desired template. This article is for some of our more advanced EntitySpaces users. Not only are we making EntitySpaces very easy to use but also very easy to extend. Everything you see in this blog post is running under Visual Studio.

The Template Header

In this post we'll take a look at both the Template Browser and the template user interface mechanism. The Template Browser lists the templates in a tree based on each template's Namespace located in the template header (shown left). You can see from the TemplateInfo tag in the template header that there is both a Namespace and a UniqueID attribute. The UniqueID will be discussed later when we dig into the user interface. Now, however, let's take a look at the Template Browser. The Template Browser is shown below (while running under Visual Studio). 

 

The Template Browser

You can select any template and click the green arrow to execute a template which will display the template's user interface, if any.

The Template User Interface

Look at the image below to get an idea of what happens when we click on the green arrow to execute the template. Notice the tabs on the image above are gone. Also notice in the open solution in our EntitySpaces.TemplateUI project there are three user controls. Basic, Advanced, and ProxyStub. These correspond to the three tabs you see on the screen below. We (and you) can write your user interface in pure Windows.Forms user controls and have full IntelliSense. You also have direct binding capabilities to our metadata. Now only that, but you can extend our templates with your own user interface by adding an additional tab. Again, this is only for necessary for those that want to extend EntitySpaces.

 

What you are looking at above is the template user interface which slides over and across the normal tabs. The template user interface is shown until you press Ok to execute the template or Cancel it. Once the template is executed the normal tabs such as Projects, Templates, and so on become visible again. It's pretty cool to see it in action. When the user presses Ok you simply stuff the users UI choices into the esMeta object's (metadata object) input Hashtable during the OnExecute method. So, how can you extend the user interface without modifying our templates and not be worried about a new release wiping out your changes? Easy. Let's look at how the UI works at a low level.

A Template User Interface Tab

Below is all that is necessary to add a tab to our existing templates, or add them for your own custom template. Notice we implement the ITemplateUI class. This means we need to implement the Init, OnExecute, and OnCancel methods. In the Init method, you tie your user control to a template via the TempalteInfo.TempalteId property, making sure to match it to the template's UniqueID in the template header (shown at the beginning of this post).

The above image is the code for the "Basic" tab that you see on the template user interface above. This is housed in it's own assembly and stored in a particular folder that the plug-in scans. Take a look at the Init() method which returns an esTemplateInfo object. Here we are indicating that when the template with the UniqueID of "2216AB4F-BDB4-47de-8412-8560C1F2F420" is executed we want this user control on a tab called "Basic Information". If you look at the OnExecute() method this is where we will store the users choices. (Later we will access them in our custom template). Recall that in ES2009 you will be able to add templates into our template stack to extend and customize EntitySpaces. The good thing is our templates will use use the same mechanism for our user interface. So, all three the tabs you see in the template user interface above are represented by an individual user control. The second parameter to Init() above is really the DTE2 ApplicationObject which will allow your user interface to have full access the visual studio solution just like our plug-in does. We pass it in as type "object" so that you are not forced to bind with the Visual Studio Plug-in assemblies unless you really want to.

 

Binding to the Metadata in your User Control

Notice how use the esMeta object passed into our ITemplateUI.Init() method to populate our user interface controls. Since this is all just normal Windows.Forms programming you can bind directly to our metadata collections and it could not be any easier.

We hope you like what you are seeing.

From mobile devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with medium trust requirements, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

The EntitySpaces Team
--

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net

EntitySpaces 2009 (see roadmap) will plug right into Visual Studio and it will use its own internal code generator. This means that Visual Studio users will never have to leave Visual Studio to work on or generate their EntitySpaces architecture. The image below shows how EntitySpaces 2009 looks embedded within Visual Studio. While it is likely to change a little before our first beta this should provide you with a feel for ES2009. The nice thing is that ES2009 is a dockable window just like any other window within Visual Studio, you can even generate your EntitySpaces classes directly into your solution and the folders/files will be created automatically for you. We are also making our VistaDB and SQL CE providers version independent so you will no longer have to deal version issues during code generation.

 

The EntitySpaces 2009 Tabs

• Projects Tab - Projects allow you to record templates so that you can play them back at any time. Thus, you can regenerate with all of the settings you used when you recorded the session originally.
• Templates Tab - The template browser lists all of the templates available to you, you can launch them from this tab.
• Metadata Tab - The metadata tab allows you to examine all of the database metadata that EntitySpaces provides to your templates during code generation. Also the user meta data can be edited through this tab which allows you to alias columns, indicate Oracle sequences, and other things.
• Settings Tab - The settings tab is where you add connections to various databases, indicate paths such as where your user meta data is located, the location of your output folder, and all kinds of EntitySpaces configuration settings.
• Mappings Tab - This tab lists the mappings between database column types to .NET types.

 

If you are not a Visual Studio user no need to worry. We will provide a stand alone windows forms application that will look and work almost exactly the same (see below).

 

The image above is the same binary code that runs under Visual Studio. We are developing both the Visual Studio compatible version and the Stand Alone version at the same time. Expect another blog post by the end of October which provide you with more insight into ES2009 including many more screen shots. Our goal is to have our first beta out by the end of 2008.

From mobile devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with medium trust requirements, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

The EntitySpaces Team
--

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net