EntitySpaces is pleased to announce support for the Sybase SQL Anywhere Database Management System. Our plan is to support iAnywhere for both high end server applications as well as on the Compact Framework for mobile applications which will further strengthen EntitySpaces' mobile abilities (we already support Microsoft SQL CE and VistaDB for mobile applications). If there is demand we will consider supporting the Sybase SQL Anywhere UltraLite version as well.

SQL Anywhere provides data management and exchange technologies designed for database-powered applications that operate in frontline environments without onsite IT support. It offers enterprise-caliber features in a database that is easily embedded and widely deployed in server, desktop, remote office and mobile applications. Sybase iAnywhere has been named number one in the worldwide mobile device management enterprise software market for the seventh consecutive year.

The image above shows EntitySpaces 2009 walking the SQL Anywhere Demo Database metadata. We have already generated a full EntitySpaces set of classes complete with our hierarchical object model against the Sybase demo database and have created an EntitySpaces.SybaseSqlAnywhereProvider.dll DataProvider that can successfully query Sybase using our DynamicQuery API. For instance, we are able to execute queries like this just fine.

EmployeesCollection coll = new EmployeesCollection();
coll.Query.Select(coll.Query.DepartmentID, coll.Query.City);
coll.Query.Where(coll.Query.City.Like("%F%"));
coll.Query.Load();

Of course, our Sybase support will have to fully pass our massive NUnit test suite before being released which won't actually happen until our ES2009 Q2 release. But we have made enough progress now that we can safely announce our support for Sybase. We would also like to thank the folks at Sybase for working with us and making themselves available to us. We are extremely impressed by their support and dedication to customer satisfaction, something rarely seen today from large companies, so a big thumbs up to the folks at Sybase.

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

Nick Dunham, an EntitySpaces user, created a very nice PDF and sent it to us. We thought it was great and decided to share it on our blog. Here is a snippet from the document ...

EntitySpaces 2009 (ES) works great for setting up and running projects from within Visual Studio (VS). Once I have a project set up, I can execute it by opening “Tools | EntitySpaces”, load my project, and go. As a companion to this, I started using the new command line version of EntitySpaces so I could skip the basic steps (once I configured my project with the tool). The setup instructions below allow me to execute an ES project using the External Tools features of VS ...

Checkout the PDF file HERE or a ZIP file HERE. It's best viewed when zoomed to around 150% to 175% depending on your monitor size.

Nick W. Dunham, University of Florida
Office of Research, Director of Information Services

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 to demonstrate the usage of our EntitySpaces 2009 Projects Files. Watch the video and project files will quickly become one of your favorite features of our Visual Studio Integration.

Please give the video a few moments to load.

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

EntitySpaces 2009 Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET

We are pleased to announce the official release of EntitySpaces 2009 Q1. The version number is 2009.1.0209.0. The Trial Version has also been upgraded to the official release. EntitySpaces 2009 Q1 is a terrific product, if you have been using our beta or our release candidate then you know EntitySpaces 2009 feels like putting on your favorite pair of jeans, it's just feels right. No longer are we dependent upon third party code generation tools and this frees us up to be really creative.  EntitySpaces 2009 is also very high performance as it contains the performance enhancements we made at the tail end of 2008. Customers who have source code access will be able download it within a few days.

Features of EntitySpaces 2009:

• Complete Visual Studio integration.
• Stand alone executable for those not using Visual Studio.
• No third party code generation tools required (No need for MyGeneration or CodeSmith). 
• Project files to record and play back your code generation process with a single click.
• Command line tool that can execute your EntitySpaces projects in continuous integration builds.
• Debugger Visualizer and other debugging enhancements.
• Totally updated Web Admin Templates.
• Lots of samples available on the EntitySpaces 2009 menu after installation including:

1. EntitySpacesDemo (C#) - Windows Forms
2. EntitySpacesDemo (VB) - Windows Forms
3. SqlCeDemo (Mobile Application) - SQL CE Mobile Application
4. esDataSource (C#) - ASP.NET Web App, uses the esDataSource DataSourceControl
5. esDataSource (VB) - ASP.NET Web App, uses the esDataSource DataSourceControl
6. WCF Demo (C#) - Very extensive WCF Demo using our Full and Lightweight Proxies
7. Template User Interface (C#) - Demonstrates how to extend our templates without actually modifying our UI

Fixes since the Release Candidate:

Below are the fixes and enhancements that have been made since the release candidate.

• The SQL CE connection problem has been fixed.
• The VistaDB connection hang on a bad connection string has been fixed.
• DebuggerVisualizer capability is now included.
• DebuggerDisplay attributes is now supported.
• The Smiley Face icon is no longer our icon in Visual Studio.
• There is a new sample demonstrating how to expand our template user interfaces.

Installation Instructions For those who have it already installed

• Close Visual Studio
• Uninstall your current version of ES2009 (you will not lose your connection settings)
• Open Visual Studio - Answer yes to disable our Plug-in
• Close Visual Studio
• Install the official ES2009 Release
  

Finally, we would like to thank our customer base for all of the great and well thought out suggestions we are getting for ES2009 Q2 in our "Q2 Wish List" forum. We are very impressed with the thought and detail you are putting into your posts. If you are a potential custom looking at our forums those are the unanswered posts you see in our forums.

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

While we were adding the Debugging Visualizer logic we went ahead and added DebuggerDisplay Attributes on the Collection, Query, and Entity classes. This really helps when you look at things in watch windows. Below is a quick preview of some new enhancements coming in the official ES2009 Q1 released scheduled to be out this weekend if all goes well.

Notice the last two checkboxes (above) on the "Generated Master" Advanced tab. The DebuggerDisplay option is turned ON by default. The DebugVisualizer is OFF by default as it requires that you link to an additional assembly, but it's very cool see part one.

Here is the code we executed. Once the collection was loaded and our breakpoint was hit you can see how our watch window looks like below as well.

EmployeesCollection coll = new EmployeesCollection();
coll.Query.SelectAll();

if (coll.Query.Load())
{
    // Breakpoint here ...
}

This is our watch window ... (notice the Value column)

Notice the "coll" variable shows the Count as it's value and if we look at coll.Query property it shows the "LastQuery" value. Finally, if we index into the collection to look at actual entities you will see the entity type plus it's primary key value(s) - works for composite primary keys of course.

Well, back to work ....

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

Here is a sneak peak at our Debugger Visualizer for EntitySpaces 2009 that will be included in the official release. When inspecting variables in the debugger you will notice that there is now a magnifying glass next to your EntitySpaces collections as shown in the image below. Notice the magnifying glass on the BusinessObjects.EmployeesCollection.

When you select the EntitySpaces Debugger Visualizer you will be presented with this window which will display the contents of your collection. Remember, this all happens when you are debugging.

You can sort, rearrange columns, and see the dynamic query (if any) that was used to fetch the data. This could be a useful feature when developing your EntitySpaces applications. This does require that you check an additional checkbox on the "Generated Master" template and then link your application with our EntitySpaces.DebuggerVisualizer.dll. There is no performance issue with generating your code like this, it's purely a debugging feature. This is a pretty simple debug visualizer however we will enhance it to support single entities and additional data in future releases.

[MODIFIED]

If you check the DebugVisualizer on the Advanced Tab of the "Generated Master" template here are the steps you need to follow:

• Add a reference to the EntitySpaces.DebuggerVisualizer.dll assembly.
• Add a reference to "Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers .NET 9.0.0.0".
• Call the static method to initialize the Visualizer during your application startup, like this,  esVisualizer.Initialize().

However, we strongly recommend that you regenerate before you ship without the Visualizer checkbox checked and then you will not need to ship the Visualizer assembly (strongly recommened).  

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 new forum so that we can solicit feedback from you in a specific place and not lose track of it. So here we go, if there are features, bugs, other databases you want supported you have a voice. If you have already made such a request somewhere else in the forums please post it in this new forum also to be sure it's on our radar. We have always been very customer driven and this will allow you even more input. Of course, not everything posted will get implemented, but your input will definitely have an impact on the next release. There are a few simple rules you can follow that we really help us out.

1. Create a brand new post unless you can see your issue is clearly covered in another post (in this forum).
2. Please present your idea clearly, post example code if need be, and be sure to use the code window if posting code.
3. Please do not hi-jack existing threads and take them in totally new directions. This inevitably will happen, we understand, we expect some brainstorming in here so it's okay.
4. Definitely ping or bump other posts that you agree with so that we know you also support the requested feature or fix.

We won't skew the input into this process by posting our roadmap or ideas for Q2 and thereafter, we want to hear from 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