Help Server 2.1 is released

New features:
- Custom TOC icons.
- Localization. Language is detected automatically, currently English and Russian are supported. If you'd like to provide its localization for your own language, please send us [InstallationFolder]\Web\WebResources\WebResources.xx.resx file for it.
- Configuration is fully based on Web.config file now.

Full list of changes is published in Revision History. Updated installers are already available in Downloads section.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) sample for DO4

Here it is: http://www.x-tensive.com/Downloads/Default.aspx?Path=DataObjects.Net\Samples

What's there:
- Simple Customer-Order model
- Astoria service sharing it
- WindowsForms client consuming it
- Silverlight client consuming it.

Silverlight client screenshots:


WindowsForms client screenshots:


Installation & running:

SilverlightClient.Web:

0. Install Silverlight Tools and Silverlight 2.0.

1. Create web site with IIS Manager, home directory must be SilverlightClient.Web
2. Add Default.aspx to default pages (Web site properties -> Documents page)
3. Set ASP.NET Version to 2.x.x (Web site properties -> ASP.NET page -> ASP.NET version)
4. Add MIME type with extension: .xap and MIME type: application/x-Silverlight-app
(Web site properties -> HTTP Header page -> MIME Types button)
5. Enable anonymous access, disable "Integrated Windows authentication"
(Web site properties -> Directory Security page -> Authentication and access control,
Edit button)
6. Grant NTFS read permission to Everyone group for SilverlightClient.Web folder
6. Restart IIS.
7. Open http://localhost/[YourWebSite] in browser

WinFormsClient:

1. Run Server
2. Run WinFormsClient.

Please ask any questions related to this sample in comments to this post.

DataObjects.Net v4.0.2 is released

Links:
- Download it
- View list of implemented issues.

What's new:

1. Improved installer

I hope we've fixed the last "big bugs" there. The most annoying ones are:
- 228: "Add\remove programs" issue on installing both DO4 and Xtensive.MSBuildTasks
- 232: DO 4.0.1 installer doesn't update assemblies located in PostSharp directory
- 233: Projects created by project template are bound to specific installation path of DO4

Because of 228 & 232, the recommended upgrade path to v4.0.2 is:
- Uninstall DO4. If the item absents in "Add\Remove programs", just remove its folder C:\Program Files\X-tensive.com (or the installation path you've chosen).
- Uninstall Xtensive.MSBuildTasks, if you have installed it. If the item absents in "Add\Remove programs", just remove its folders from C:\Program Files\MSBuild and C:\Program Files\X-tensive.com (or the installation path you've chosen).
- Uninstall all other components previously required by DO4, including Unity, Parallel Extensions, MSBuild Community Tasks and PostSharp.
- Install new DO4. It will suggest to install just PoshSharp. Everything else is optional now; all Unity and Parallel Extensions assemblies are installed into GAC automatically.

Other changes include the following ones:
- Installer automatically detects & requires to uninstall old version of DO4.
- All required assemblies are now installed into GAC. If you're worried about this, there are .bat files allowing to get rid of them with ease.
- There are new project templates (Console, Model, UnitTests, WebApplication, WPF). But they're only for C# for now.
- New Build.bat files build new DO automatically performing all "before first build" steps. So it's really easy now to make its custom build.

Useful links:
- Full list of installer-related issues
- New installation instruction
- New "Building DataObjects.Net" instruction

2. LINQ

As you might remember, two weeks ago we didn't support 2 LINQ features:
- Group joins
- First\Single(OrDefault) in subqueries (btw, as far as I remember, Single in subqueries isn't supported in EF at all)

Both features are supported now. So now we're fully ready to compare our LINQ implementation with others - a set of articles about this will appear here soon.

Useful links:
- LINQ-related issues.

3. Breaking changes in attributes

We've refactored our mapping attributes once more. Now there are:
- Separate [Association] attribute for associations
- Separate [Mapping] attribute allowing to specify mapping names.
- No more [Entity] attribute - it was necessary just to specify mapping name, but now this is handled by a separate attribute.

Earlier their functions were distributed over [Field] and old abstract MappingAttribute.

We think new version is better: specific (and, actually, more rarely necessary) features require specific attributes.

4. Schema upgrade

We've added ChangeFieldTypeHint. So schema upgrade hint set is ideal now ;)

5. Documentation

We're slowly updating it. As you may find, we restructured our wiki. Manual is organized in step-by-step studying fashion now. Among other new articles, there is new Schema upgrade article - check it out.

6. ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) sample

We've implemented ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) sample on DO4. We decided to publish it separately:
- It isn't really polished yet
- It depends on Silverlight Tools, so we must decide if this additional dependency is acceptable.

It shows an Astoria service sharing entities via RESTful API, as well as WindowsForms and Silverlight clients consuming this service, showing and allowing to change the entities it gets.

What does this mean? You can share DO4 Entities using ADO.NET Data Services, query the service from the client using LINQ, update the entities on the client and send back the changes. Since Astoria client operates on Silverlight as well, you can implement Silverlight client utilizing DO4 on the server.

Btw... We disappointed in Astoria client features. You should do lots of tasks manually there, including registering of new entities, changed associations and so on. From the point of usability it's much worse than what is offered by DO4. So in general, upcoming sync will be much more attractive option for DO4 users. But on the other hand, Astoria allows to implement really simple RESTful integration API with almost zero coding.

The sample will be available @ our downloads section today.

7. Bugfixes

We've got really good results here. Earlier I wrote there are just few failing tests from about 1000 tests for Storage. Imagine:
- About 600 tests are related to our LINQ implementation, and indirectly - RSE implementation.
- All the tests produce the same results - even on Memory storage. This means our RSE execution & optimization engine works as expected.

So the version we have now seems really stable. Good luck trying it ;)

June and summer discounts: join DO4 camp!

We're ready to start DataObjects.Net promotional campaign, and as frequently happens, it starts from pricing. Read this post till the end - we're providing huge discounts in June, but expect your involvement in exchange.

Price & licensing policy changes

This summer prices:

- Personal license: 299 USD (no changes)

- Internal license: 495 USD (-100 USD)

- SMB license: 995 USD (-1000 USD)

- Enterprise license: please request a qoute.

- Upgrade subscription: 50% of the license cost. To order it, you must order the original license with DOUPGRADE discount coupon code. Note that it's applicable only if your exising subscription isn't expired - it expires in 1 year form the first purchase; each purchased upgrade subscription adds 1 more year.

- Support subscription: now included into the cost of license.

- Implementation assistance and general consulting: 320 USD/day.

Discounts in June

First of all, we provide 50% discount on almost anything related to DO4, including:

- Licenses: they cost 150/248/498 USD in June. Quote for Entrprise license is provided by request.

- Upgarde subscriptions: 90/149/299 USD in June (so here the discount is 40%)

- Implementation assistance and consulting: 160 USD/day! This price will be definitely left intact till the end of summer.

Coupon code: JDDO4 - right now it is already included into all order pages.

Huge discounts for the people helping us

The conditions listed in this section will remain intact at least till the end of summer.

1. Promotion help discount: additional 50%.

Applicable to new license purchases only. You promise us to statisfy one of the following requirements during 1 month after your purchase:

1) You start or join, and further - maintain 3 different discussions on such developer's web site or forum as stackoverflow.com (it must be for .NET developers, and be well-known either worldwide or in your country).

The duscussions must be related to DO4 - its particular or upcoming features. We don't expect it must be fully positive - it must be simply honest. And there should be links to our wiki, blog or DO4 section on our web site.

2) If you maintain a well-known blog (well-known - of course, relatively - e.g. in your city; ideally, there must be >100 subscribers), you can publish 2 posts related to DO4 in it. Again, with your honest opinion and with links to us.

Please send the links to such discussions or posts to us - at least, as a proof you accomplished your part of contract ;) We'll join the discussion, if it will be necessary.

If you already did something similar, please notify us, and if we'll confirm the conditions listed here are satisfied, feel free to use the coupon code for this dicount.

As you see, we provide additional 50% discount (= 75% now) in exchange for several hours of your help. The final prices with this discount are:

- Licenses: 75/124/244 USD in June, or 150/248/498 USD later. Coupon code:JDDO4POSTER. Note that you can use it right now, but this implies your agree with the above conditions.

2. Contributor licenses: free SMB \ Enterprise licenses with lifetime upgrade and support

We're ready to provide free licenses, if you'd like to help us to develop or promote the product. What can be done to get a free license:

a) Significantly help us to develop some part of DO - for example:

- SQL DOM / storage provider for the database we don't support yet, or some notable part of it

- Sample application (currently we'd prefer good samples for ASP.NET or ADO.NET data services / Silverlight) or some notable part of it

- Useful tool (anything you miss ;) ) or some notable part of it

- Some other part we're planning to implement.

Expected complexity: if it took more than 10 full-time days, and we accepted the result, we'll definitely provide such a license. But other cases are discussable - we're ready for any proposals like this.

Obviously, it's necessary to discuss your plan with us before starting the implementation.

b) Promote DO4 at your local .NET, ALT.NET or similar user group - by making 1.5 hour overview of it there. You can choose any particular part you want, but ideally it should be based on our videos or on our own presentation of DO (will appear in June).

c) Do anything you want comparable to a) or b) by its effect. In fact, we expect you'll spend ~ 1-2 weeks on this, and the result of this will be attractive for DO users.

Remarks

As you may find, our goal for this summer is to grow up the community around DO4. Prices and earnings don't really matter for us.

But you may ask:

Why are you asking to pay something at all? The reason is simple: paid money is one of factors making things precious for you. We expect they'll make our simple "promo agreements" more important for both sides.

Why now? Because we feel the product is fully ready to be shown to much wider audience. Right now it can do more than e.g. currently available version of Entity Framework. But I hope by the end of summer it will be capable to simply smash it by the set of its built-in features.

Ok, of course I fully understand it won't be easy to compete with EF. But imagine, if EF would be shipped by someone else rather than Microsoft. I admit it would be really hard to get a big niche on ORM scene with its design. Really, they're providing features almost identical to NHibernate, but packed into "Microsoft way" box. It's really hard to identify what's new there. I'd also say this is dangerous for NHibernate as well.

I feel we're combining something very good both from open source and commercial development by running this campaign. I hope it will help to involve the people. Our purely commercial promo campaign will follow shortly - we'll be spending almost 5 times more on advertisements starting from the next week (I'm waiting for completion of a set of vital changes on our web site & Wiki). But your help is more important - just rumors, posts and articles make such products really famous.

So I suggest you to join our community right now. Together we'll go forward much faster. Ask yourselves:

- What commercial ORM is as open as DO4? We'd say even non-commercial are less open. Open source, availability under GPL, public issue tracker, open plans, Wiki that can be edited by you, possibility to contribute.

- Do you expect EF will ever run on open source platform? DO4 will definitely run on Mono in observable future.

- Is there any chance of getting DO4 development stopped during the nearest years, if we were ready to spend 2.5 years on developing this new version?

- Does DO4 differ from competitors? Even the current feature set shows it is. Architecturally it's completely new. Such schema upgrade layer, support for index storages, built-in IMDB, integrated query engine, upcoming sync - who else have these features?

- What features are expected in near future? There are tons of them on the way. You may find the product you see now, although being solid, shows a huge foundation for upcoming features. And that's cool, because the baby is just 2 week old! Ok, I know, but the pregnancy was long ;)

- Are we devoted to DO4? You must feel it worth much more than just money for us. It is a part of our image and reputation.

- Can you rely on it and on us? I hope, yes - taking into account above, as well as the experience (including support incidents) we've got during previous years of work on 1.X-3.X.

Join DO4 camp!

P.S. Even if you already have a license, think about writing something good about us ;)

[The post is copied from DataObjects.Net Team Blog]

Help Server 2.0.5 is out

GZip compression and Google Analytics-like trackers support are among other new features. Full list of changes is published in Revision History.

Updated installers are already available in Downloads section.

DataObjects.Net v4.0.1 is out

It is purely a bugfixing release. Full list of fixes we've made is available in DataObjects.Net issue tracker.

Updated installers are published in Downloads section.

P.S. We recommend you to subscribe to DataObjects.Net Team Blog - now it is updated almost daily.

DataObjects.Net v4.0 final is released

DataObjects.Net v4.0 final is published in downloads section of our web site.

Most important changes we've made last month include:

1. Schema upgrade API. Shortly it will be fully described @ wiki, for now you can try out Upgrade Sample. There are 3 applications representing different versions of the same one. They must be run sequentially except the first one (it recreates the database), although you can try running them in order.

Upgrade API is really simple. To gracefully handle an upgrade, you must:

- Add AssemblyInfo attribute to AssemblyInfo.cs file: [assembly: AssemblyInfo("MyAssembly", "2.0")]

- Extend UpgradeHandler in each changed model assembly - it will assist to upgrade its structures.

- If necessary, override its AddUpgradeHints method and add instances of UpgradeHint ancestors there: RenameFieldHint, CopyFieldHint, RenameTypeHint. Note that upgrade hints are model-level hints, not schema-level.

- If necessary, apply [Recycled] attribute to some of your types and fields and override it OnUpgrade method to implement custom data migration logic from recycled structures there.

All these steps are shown in upgrade sample.

As you may find, UpgradeHandler offers more extension points, and there are schema-level upgrade hints as well. Normally they shouldn't be used - we translate our model-level hints to schema-level hints automatically. But some of them can be useful - for example, IgnoreHint instructing schema comparison layer to skip the specified schema object.

2. Refactored LINQ translator. Almost no differences outside (it passes just few more new tests), but a huge set of them inside. Faster, much simpler and eaisier to extend. Did I mention we're going to support custom LINQ extensions? Well, this version allows us to implement this gracefully.

3. Refactored mapping attributes. Since we've been shipping final, this became rather important. Details can be found here; new samples reflect this. Wiki will be updated in accordance shortly.

4. Improved installer & documentation

- Regular build installer now contains all downloadable prerequisites integrated

- VS.NET project template now contains much less references

- Brief version of class reference is provided @ help.x-tensive.com and installed as .Chm. Full version (.HxS) is integrated into VS.NET help collection.

Other important changes:

- Domain & Session events

- Improved PropertyConstraintAspect - now custom error message can be specified right in the attribute declaration

- New validators. See inheritors of PropertyConstraintAspect.

- We decided to get rid of VistaDB support. Earlier it was easy because of its good compatibility with SQL Server, but now it becomes more and more complex. There are actually many differences - normally acceptable for humans, but making much more complex machine translation for it. Our LINQ implementation and schema upgrade API provide very high level of compatibility between different RDBMS, and this compatibility costs a lot. So we'll focus on more frequently used RDBMS (Oracle, MySQL); furthermore, presence of our own memory provider and upcoming file system provider makes support of embedded databases much less necessary.

Public issue tracker is open

And finally, during the last month we've been using issue tracker on Google code (btw, it is really good). So all we did is easy to expose now: check out "Done" grid for v4.0 final. Previous changes are related to "Pre4.0" milestone, so they aren't shown here. Quicks statistics:

- 25 defects

- 14 new features

- 9 enchancements

- 9 refactorings

- 9 non-coding tasks.

Total: 66 issues.

If you're interested in near future, take a look at similar grid for v4.1. Some features mentioned here (mainly, fixes & tasks) will be separated to v4.0.5, which will be available in ~ 2 weeks.

And as I mentioned, from this point we're switching to monthly release cycle. So v4.1 can be expected in the first half of July.

Help Server 2.0 is out

Please refer to Revision history for the complete list of changes (it's short, but all items are really important). You can download it here.

Note: we decreased help topic limit to 100 for Express Edition.

Its pages on our web site aren't updated yet (will be done next week), so there are no "Buy upgrade" links. But its User Guide is already updated, and all "Buy now" links are correct there.

P.S. I published first relatively big post @ blog.dataobjects.net.

Announcement: Help Server 2.0

Hi everyone! We're glad to announce we're ready to release Help Server v2.0. This will happen on this week.

What's new:
- Full .HxS format support
- Lucene.Net based full-text search
- Faster startup. Full-text and keyword indexes are built in background now.
- Improved Index tab
- New URL-based query APIs: now you can invoke full-text search and index lookup using special URLs. Both these features are designed to integrate your class reference with conceptual description, manual or Wiki. Check out how index lookup works at wiki.dataobjects.net.

Note: help.x-tensive.com is running on one week old build. We're aware there are some issues. In particular:
- Many pages aren't covered by full-text search
- Index lookup doesn't open the queried page. It should do this, if there is just one candidate.

Certainly these issues will be resolved before release.

DataObjects.Net gets its own blog

Go to http://blog.dataobjects.net. The detailed description is there now.