I’d like to be see the WCF data contract stuff extended to produce POCOs outside the WCF environment. This would be great for MVC apps where passing such a rich entity to the view layer is not ideal.

I’ve just tryed to find “Get started” by pressing right mouse button in model designer but there is only Arrange and Properties.

EDIT: I’ve just found solution for my issue before posting this comment. “Get started” option is not available when Designer is empty.

Yes, you could use a stored procedure to get composite CustomerInfo entities and work with them in the normal LightSpeed way. However, there are certain limitations in this case, as you hint in your comment.

- You cannot combine your own query clauses with a stored procedure. Therefore, although you use LINQ against a sproc call (e.g. “from ci in uow.GetCustomerInfos() where ci.CustomerName == …”), it will *not* be executed on the database like normal LINQ queries: instead, the sproc will be executed normally, all data returned by the sproc will be returned from the database, and the LINQ query will execute client-side against the IList (using LINQ to Objects).

- As JD says, stored procedures are currently select-only. Therefore you cannot insert, update or delete composite entities: SaveChanges will attempt to save them back to a table, which of course does not exist. (To be clear, LightSpeed itself has no notion of “composite entities” — it doesn’t know whether the entities you are loading through a sproc are normal table rows, which *are* saveable, or not — so it can’t be “smart” about this: all it can do is try to save the entities and report the failure when it happens.) I’m hoping that we’ll be able to address this limitation in 3.0, but we have a lot of features on the table for 3.0 and we can make no promises!

Regarding profiling, as JD says, if you have ideas and suggestions above and beyond what’s currently available, let us know: now is a great time because we’re starting to think about 3.0. (We’d suggest posting in the forums rather than in blog comments because that makes it easier for other users to see what’s being suggested and to throw in their own ideas and feedback.)

@nefajciar If you drag on a stored procedure that is a projection (either of part of a table, or in the case you highlight, two tables) the designer will generate an entity for you that contains all the required properties. There is no provision currently for then transparently managing the saving of that entity back into both tables. This is a first version implementation of our stored procedures capability. You got it right with “I understand that you can’t completely map stored procedures capabilities” but we’re always happy to hear feature requests! I’ll leave Ivan answer the LINQ point.

Missing the profiler? You can get SQL dumps of what’s going on by enabling logging. There is an example of this in the eager load screencast. Let me know if you had other ideas about profiling.

@Nick Thanks for your feedback. I’ve fixed the issue with the store – I had updated the installers but missed updating the label of the version. Check it out now. Thanks for the positive comments :-)

Good work guys, and very “fast” release, a great fresh start of the New Year. I have 1 question regarding stored procedures though…

You have mentioned that with stored procedures we are able to “create composite entities”, does it mean that if I have table “Customers” and “Customer_Details” and I require an entity that is composed of these two tables, that I am able (via stored procedure and LS) to get an entity of some type (say CustomerInfo) and work with the entity in the normal LS way?

Will there be LINQ support? What about Update/Delete operations on the CustomerInfo entity type? Will it transparently “hit” both tables?
Or is this “procedural” type somewhat limited in what it can do?

Thanks for answers, I understand that you can’t completely map stored procedures capabilities (which are absolutely unlimited in some databases) to a fully working object model…

And many thanks for Lightspeed 2.2, the only thing we miss now is profiler :))