Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Last night we moved our site(s) over to dedicated hosting, there are a few kinds, very, very minor. We are working through those, but overall, things went incredibly well. The system is incredibly responsive. One of the main things you will see is that we are moving away from the Community Server forums and will be using the integrated DotNetNuke forums. The old forums are still available but will be made read only at some point in the near future. Click on the Forums link on our main menu to get to the new forums. There is an announcement post there.

Expect a more extensive blog post later on tonight …

EntitySpaces

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 Silverlight/WCF application, 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

posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 7:55:15 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Customer Service

First, we’d like to share something with you about licensing. Many times folks write to us and say they missed their upgrade deadline by a few days or a week (within reason) or so and we cut them a break and let them renew at the renewal fee. We really try to work hard to keep our customers happy. Our experience with other software companies has not been the same kind of customer service or support that we try very hard to offer. After a long time of struggling to get Community Server upgraded we finally got it working (only to find out that within a mere few minutes it hits the 100 meg memory limit and our hosting company kills the process). This is no fault of our hosting company, Community Server is just a hog, we’re talking very little traffic and it’s reaching 100 meg right out of the gate. Then, we tried to get a hold on where we stood with our licensing issues with Community Server, here is the email we received.

Hi Mike,

I received notification that you need to renew your annual software maintenance.  It seems that you upgraded from a Small Business license to a Professional license on 4/2/08.  This means your maintenance expired on 4/1/09.

Annual maintenance on a Professional license is $1,000.  In order to bring your support current we would need to invoice you for a year plus the lapse in coverage.  So, it would be $1,700 and the valid dates would be 4/1/09 - 11/1/10.

Please let me know how you wish to proceed.  Thanks!

Services Account Coordinator, Telligent

Now granted, we lapsed a long time ago, no problem, we understand. However, this is a new one on us, we are being charged for the time our license was expired. How bizarre? We are paying back wages for a product it took us forever working with their technical support to team just to get installed and running. Maybe the $1,700 is less than just buying it brand new again, we have no idea and aren’t going to ask. We are half tempted to take EntitySpaces and its powerful database independence and write a killer .NET forum that can run on all of our supported databases to to showcase it’s capabilities. A PHPBB for .NET if you will. Anyway, enough on that.

Dedicated Hosting

The good news is we are finally moving to a VPS or quite possibly dedicated hosting. We are currently talking with Server Intellect and if things go well the transition will happen very quickly and things will be incredibly responsive for you our customers.

- The EntitySpaces Team

EntitySpaces

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 Silverlight/WCF application, 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

posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 7:33:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]

EntitySpaces, LLC has noticed a new trend that is reshaping the software industry. There apparently has been such a radical increase in the productivity of the average programmer that most software projects are now being written entirely by one person teams. At least that is what our statistics are bearing out. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small, medium, Fortune 500, or even a Fortune 50 company, it would appear that everyone has transitioned to one person development teams.

EntitySpaces is licensed per developer, yet the overwhelming statistics for purchase orders are for a single user licenses regardless of the size of the company making the purchase. And at $299.00 for a single copy that’s less than a dollar a day for a given company for that year.

We are a small company which creates a great product and would really appreciate it if folks would take the time to review our license agreement and make sure they are honoring the license agreement in full …

Our developer licenses are licensed per developer seat. A developer seat is required for each developer that uses the EntitySpaces API which includes using the generated classes in their programming tasks.

Thank you for those who honor this agreement. If you find yourself in violation of this agreement please contact us or purchase more licenses to make yourself current.

Thank you …

- The EntitySpaces Team

EntitySpaces

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 Silverlight/WCF application, 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

posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 12:18:16 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Sunday, November 08, 2009

We are sorry for the inconvenience. We are having issues getting the discountasp.net system to restore our database (no data has been lost) it’s just very frustrating, we are working with them trying to solve this.

- The EntitySpaces Team

posted on Sunday, November 08, 2009 11:03:20 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Monday, October 26, 2009

This is a quick post to explain how to use the new built in EntitySpaces Concurrency Mechanism. Basically, all that is required is that you add an integer type column to your table. In the table below I have added a column named “MyTimestamp” which is of type “int”. All we need to do now is drill down to this column on the EntitySpaces “Metadata” Tab and indicate that we want to use this as our concurrency column.

thetable 

This is very easy, and if you’re on our Q3 release there are no more name/value pairs, you simply enter user metadata choices directly in the property grid.

image

Notice here I have set the IsEntitySpacesConcurrency flag to true. Now all I have to do is click the little Save icon and regenerate my “Generated” class.

The path to the Metadata file can be found on the “Settings” tab in the “File Locations” section. See the “User Metadata” path. The resulting xml for the simple entry above is as follows.

<esUserData Version="2009.2.1012.0">
  <Drivers>
    <Driver Name="SQL">
      <Databases>
        <Database Name="MyDatabase">
          <Tables>
            <Table Name="MyTable">
              <Columns>
                <Column Name="MyTimestamp" IsEntitySpacesConcurrency="True" />
              </Columns>
            </Table>
          </Tables>
        </Database>
      </Databases>
    </Driver>
  </Drivers>
</esUserData>

This technique can be used on all non-compact framework databases ..

EntitySpaces

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 Silverlight/WCF application, 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

posted on Monday, October 26, 2009 9:02:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Sunday, October 04, 2009

VistaDB 4.0 Support

We have made a new version of the EntitySpaces Developer available (2009.2.1005.0) that supports VistaDB 4.0. The official release of VistaDB 4.0 was just made available and within 24 hours of it’s release we have added support for it. The EntitySpaces Developer version is available but we haven’t updated the Trial version yet. That will happen within the next 24 hours or so. You can install this right over the top of the 2009.2.0928.0 release, just make sure you have Visual Studio closed. There are now two choices on the Settings tab when connecting to VistaDB.

  1. VistaDB   = VistaDB 3.x
  2. VistaDB4 = VsitaDB 4.x

Also, there is a new EntitySpaces DataProvider that is used with VistaDB 4.x. The assembly name is EntitySpaces.VistaDB4Provider.dll. In your config file in the EntitySpaces connection information you use “EntitySpaces.VistaDB4Provider” as the provider. There are no VistaDB 4.0 compact framework providers as VistaDB 4.0 does not currently ship a Compact Framework assembly.

Fixed the “||” Issue

There was an issue with the || (or) symbol. This has been fixed. In C# you should always be able to use && for AND and || for OR. Of course, in VB.NET you just use the OR and AND keywords.

VB.NET Nullable Type Query Issue

There was an issue that was causing VB.NET developers to use .Value when used nullable types in DynamicQuery statements. This has been fixed.

EntitySpaces

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 Silverlight/WCF application, 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

posted on Sunday, October 04, 2009 6:20:05 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The rules … bird

  1. You must follow EntitySpaces on Twitter to be eligible.
  2. You must include the hashtag #EntitySpaces in your tweet (with the #)
  3. The contest starts today and ends October 31st, 2009.
  4. Winners will be announced on November 1st, 2009.

What can you win?

A one year extension on your “Developer” and or “Source Code” licenses. If you are not a current customer you will win a free “Developer” license. There will be three winners chosen.

Some Ideas …

  1. Tweet about your EntitySpaces experience, what’s cool about it, how it saves time, solves problems, and so on.
  2. Tweet about a blog entry you have written on EntitySpaces.
  3. Tweet about a product or site you have created with EntitySpaces.
  4. Use your imagination.

How will the Judging be done?

We will feed all valid tweets into the EntitySpaces 2009 tweet analyzer and through a series of complex algorithms it will spit out the top three.

PS: We use TweetDeck and if you want to follow the EntitySpaces Twitter contest add a column and put a filter on EntitySpaces.

 EntitySpaces

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 Silverlight/WCF application, 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

posted on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 6:41:11 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Sunday, September 27, 2009
kick it on DotNetKicks.com Shout it

We are pleased to make our Official EntitySpaces Q3 Release available. Both the Developer and Source code are available for download to current customers and the Trial version is the official ES2009 Q3 production release as well. The version number is 2009.2.0928.0. We recommend you download ES2009 Q3 saving it to disk and then install via the Start menu’s “Run As …” command and run as “Admin”. This is necessary for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

NOTE: You must regenerate your “Generated” classes and your stored procedures, if using stored procedures.

The EntitySpaces 2009 Q3 release has some of the best support for Silverlight and WCF that any ORM has to offer. Our smart proxies are very powerful and make working with WCF services and Silverlight a breeze. See the PDF’s in our Silverlight and WCF demos. Also, our DynamicQuery API is much more powerful in this release. Here is a quick list of features, fixes, and enhancements that are in this release.

The release notes can be found in this PDF file. There are some breaking changes with our 0209 Production Release which is unusual for us, however, they are pretty minor.

  • Sybase SQL Anywhere Support Including the Compact Framework
  • Excellent Silverlight and WCF Support
  • 64 bit runtime assemblies are included
  • A New EntitySpaces.DynamicQuery Assembly which is Silverlight Compliant
  • A New EntitySpaces Generic Concurrency Mechanism for all databases
  • DynamicQuery - The Having Clause is Now Supported
  • DynamicQuery - Full Expressions in OrderBy and GroupBy
  • DynamicQuery - Daisy Chaining Syntax has been fixed
  • DynamicQuery - Supports “Raw SQL” Everywhere
  • DynamicQuery - Sub Operator Ordering Fix
  • DynamicQuery - Order of Values More Flexible
  • DynamicQuery – Serializable in XML (very tiny packets)
  • DynamicQuery – Parse() method allows you to get the SQL without executing the statement
  • Major Proxy Stub Enhancements (WCF/WebServices/Silverlight) and Compact XML Mode
  • Enhanced UserData.xml file (support for multi dabase developers)
  • Editing User Metadata Easier through the .NET Property Grid
  • Connection Configuration Information Enhancements (no longer read only, catalog/schema added)
  • VistaDB and Microsoft SQL CE Password Bug Fixes
  • Microsoft SQL CE “TOP” syntax fixed
  • There is now a Twitter toolbar button on the “Whats New” tab
  • In the Settings “Other” tab you can control what double-click means for a template.
  • In the Settings “Other” tab you can turn off the DateTime stamp in the header.
  • Brand new Silverlight and WCF Demos
  • We are now bound to VistaDB 3.4.1.84

Of course, there are many other internal changes not listed in the above list.

One thing we didn’t get completed is “path relative project files”. We know this is a very important feature however it turned out be be more complicated than we first thought. However, this will be a high priority for 2010. Also, the Trial version comes with the source code to our Sybase plugin for our code generation engine which will allow you to easily switch Sybase versions. The ES2009 Q3 Developer does not have the Sybase source in it, we will make it available via a separate download.

We will be doing a series of blog posts highlighting a lot of these new features so stay tuned.

 

EntitySpaces

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 Silverlight/WCF application, 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

posted on Sunday, September 27, 2009 9:32:03 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Thursday, September 24, 2009

We have posted a pre-release build of the 2009.2.0928.0 release. We really need your help, it's for customers only, you'll find it under our Products => Download menu on our main site

  • You should close Visual Studio
  • Uninstall your previous ES2009 release
  • Install the new “Test” release
  • Regenerate your "Generated" classes and stored procedures (if you're using stored procedures)

Please report in on this thread and let us know if you were able to test and what database you are using. The more non-Microsoft SQL users the better. We will be publishing the official release Sunday night. We know this is a lot to ask but we really would like some extra testing before the official release.

- The EntitySpaces Team

posted on Thursday, September 24, 2009 9:18:23 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Monday, September 07, 2009

Better Naming Logic

This is a non-breaking change and won’t effect your current codebase. Take a look at this SQL table, notice that the table name and column names are full of funky characters and such …

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Crazy Names # 123 !(*]
(
    [PrimaryKey#] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
    [ Field With Spaces ] [nchar](10) NULL,
    [123FieldStartingWithANumber] [nchar](10) NULL,
    [Field with % Special # Characters , In It) ] [nchar](10) NULL,
    [A Field] [nchar](10) NULL,
    [A_Field] [nchar](10) NULL,
    [StandardFieldName] [nchar](10) NULL,
    [_wow_this_is_crazy.man ok] [nchar](10) NULL,
    [this#dba##should###be####fired#####.ok] [nchar](10) NULL,
    [_ALIAS_ME_#$%] [nchar](10) NULL,
)

This is what the resulting class looks like (in the past, we didn’t handle these so well)

[Serializable]
abstract public class esCrazyNames123 : esEntity
{
    public System.Int32? PrimaryKey;
    public System.String FieldWithSpaces;
    public System.String _123FieldStartingWithANumber;
    public System.String FieldWithSpecialCharactersInIt;
    public System.String AField;
    public System.String A_Field;
    public System.String StandardFieldName;
    public System.String _Wow_This_Is_CrazyManOk;
    public System.String ThisDbaShouldBeFiredOk;
    public System.String MyAlias;
}

You may have noticed the last field “MyAlias” is different. That is because we Aliased it to ensure Aliasing still works. Aliasing is done via the Metadata tabl. You might also notice that “underscores” were left in the column names. However, this is not the default. We merely check the “Preserve Underscores” checkbox because of the “A Field” and A_Field” columns so they wouldn’t conflict. “Preserve Underscores” if off by default. Take a look at this screen shot.

image

Notice on the “Naming Conventions” tab we have “Preserve Underscores” checked. Also, you might notice the “Trimlist” field is completely gone, it is not used anymore. But don’t worry, these changes will not effect your current objects.

Here are the rules basically for Property names in .NET


if(Char.IsLetterOrDigit(character))
{
    // this character is valid
}

The only exception to this rule is you can have an “_” underscores and the 1st character cannot be a number. That’s it. So now, no matter how things are created in your database EntitySpaces will always generate valid classes that compile out of the box, no need for aliasing unless you want to.

 

DynamicQuery Parse() Method

You can now capture the SQL Syntax a DynamicQuery would generate without having to execute it. This is done via the Parse() method like so:

CrazyNames123 c = new CrazyNames123();
c.Query.es.Top = 1;
c.Query.Where(c.Query.MyAlias == "asdf");
string str = c.Query.Parse();

This can come in handy when writing your queries …

EntitySpaces

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 Silverlight application, 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

posted on Monday, September 07, 2009 9:29:09 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]