Archive for December, 2009

LightSpeed 3.0 released!

LightSpeed 3 Logo

We’re proud to announce the release of LightSpeed 3.0, the latest version of our high-productivity, high-performance domain modelling framework and object-relational mapper, available for download today. LightSpeed 3 is packed with new features and we’ll be diving into them in more detail over the coming weeks, but here’s a quick overview of what’s new.

Querying enhancements

LightSpeed 3.0 offers a massively extended querying engine, with support for joins, grouping and subqueries. LINQ to LightSpeed makes it easy to take advantage of these new features, allowing you to write a whole range of queries that were previously impossible.

Migrations

LightSpeed 3.0 introduces a new migrations framework, enabling you to capture and customise your database change scripts. You can capture the changes you make to your model using the LightSpeed designer, customise them if required, and put them under version control so they can later be run in other environments such as your test or production servers. You can build migrations into your own program, generate SQL scripts for your DBA to run, or execute the migrations directly from within Visual Studio or the command line.

This should massively help improve developer effectiveness by doing away with the need to create SQL schema migration scripts manually. Helping developers deliver solutions faster and more reliably is at the very heart of what we are trying to deliver with LightSpeed 3.0.

Designer enhancements

For many users the designer is key to LightSpeed’s productivity, and we’ve made a whole load of improvements here to support your working methods and to make your life easier! There’s too many to list here, but among the key features are:

Refactoring support: for example, you can do a solution-wide rename of an entity or property, just like you can in your Visual Studio code.
XML documentation support for entities, properties, associations and stored procedures.
Filtering the designer view to focus on a particular aggregate or subdomain.

To read about many of the existing LightSpeed designer capabilities, check out our LightSpeed Designer page. The designer is included with all versions of LightSpeed.

Improved legacy database support

Sometimes you’re working with an existing database or environment that doesn’t work with the LightSpeed conventions and where it’s just not practical to change things to accord with modern practices. Common issues are the use of composite keys and the requirement for all data access to go via stored procedures, and LightSpeed now supports both those scenarios.

Testability improvements

Mocks and fakes are important techniques for unit testing, enabling you to run tests quickly without having to reset or talk to a database. LightSpeed 3′s TestUnitOfWork and EntityFactory provide a simple way of defining and injecting test data into a LightSpeed-based solution.

Change tracking

Many users want to be able to track the changes that have been made to an item since it was loaded, for example for audit or logging purposes. LightSpeed 3 builds this facility into the core entity class so you can easily determine what fields have changed and what the original value was.

New database providers

The new SQL Server 2008 provider makes it easy to work with spatial data in a LightSpeed application, opening up all sorts of exciting possibilities for geographical information systems and spatial querying and visualisation.

We’ve also added support for IBM DB2 and for VistaDB 4.0.

New samples

We’ve added samples showing how to use LightSpeed in rich client and Web service environments, and beefed up our Web samples with a detailed and comprehensive example for the increasingly popular ASP.NET MVC framework.

New simplified licensing

We mentioned earlier today that we’ve simplified licensing for LightSpeed 3.0 into a per-developer model to avoid the confusion of our existing pricing model. We have also incorporated volume discounts into the online store to ensure that LightSpeed 3.0 is one of the most cost effective solutions to improving developer productivity you will find!

LightSpeed 3 is a huge release and we’ll have a lot more to say about it in future posts. For the time being, download the free Express edition and give it a try!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 14 December 2009

LightSpeed 3 licensing changes

Tagged as LightSpeed, News, Products

Ever since version 1, LightSpeed has used a rather specialised “We Make Kittens Cry” licensing regime, based on licensing not per seat or per site, but on per intellectual property owner. A lot of customers found this rather confusing, so for LightSpeed 3 we’re changing to a more conventional per-developer policy.

If you’re an existing customer, what does this mean for you?

First, if you purchased LightSpeed within the last 12 months, you get a free upgrade for all your current developers. You’ll need to let us know how many seats you have. You can do this from your account page and you’ll have LightSpeed 3.0 immediately!

Second, if you purchased LightSpeed more than 12 months ago, you’ll get a heavily discounted upgrade for all your current developers. You can do this from your account page and obtain LightSpeed 3.0 immediately after payment.

Since pricing is per developer, you do not need to buy an additional licence for your build server. We’ve found continuous integration to be a huge asset in terms of maintaining and delivering products, and we don’t want to put any obstacles in the way of your using LightSpeed in a continuous integration environment!

Another change in LightSpeed 3 is that there is no more Standard or Enterprise Edition. There’s only the free Express edition, and the unlimited Professional edition. Source code is available with the Professional edition, but it’s a one-off purchase, not per-seat ($499 USD). Existing Standard customers will be upgraded to Professional. Existing Enterprise customers will receive a source code licence along with their new seats.

So make a kitten happy. Upgrade to LightSpeed 3 today.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 14 December 2009

Volume discounts in time for Christmas

Tagged as News

Just a quick post today to let you know that we have recently rolled out volume discounts into our online store. For those of you looking to buy object relational mapping software or a WPF property grid for each family member this year – you’re in luck!

But more seriously, discounts will be applied as follow automatically to anyone purchasing a product from Mindscape:

3-4 licenses = 10% discount
5-9 licenses = 15% discount
10-15 licenses = 20% discount
16 or more licenses = 25% discount

These discounts should help developers in pitching Mindscape products they want to use to companies of all sizes.

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 13 December 2009

WPF Themes

Tagged as MegaPack, Products, WPF, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

Today we have released our stylish new product: WPF Themes. Using these themes you can quickly get your applications looking attractive and modern with very little work involved.

If you have .Net 3.5 installed and your browser supports XBAPs then you can try out all the themes right here.

The pack includes themes based on the Microsoft Office and Expression applications so your users will find them familiar and easy to use.

WPF Themes comes with documentation to help you get started quickly, and a few samples demonstrating how to apply a theme to your applications. The samples can also be used to view how the themes look on all the various controls that they support.

Plus, if you’re looking to make your own themes for your WPF applications, WPF Themes is a great way to help you get started. The themes are provided as source code, so you can simply copy whichever theme you like, and modify it to suit your needs. All the XAML files are well structured containing easily noticed comments making it easy to find the style for the control you want to see. Across all five themes, the order of the styles are kept the same which makes it easy to compare them.

WPF Themes is available to try out and buy today. Mega Pack customers will find WPF Themes available for download in the next few days.

Using WPF PropertyGrid or WPF Elements? The WPF Property Grid already includes two of these themes, and we’ll be shipping the remaining WPF Property Grid themes plus all five themes for Elements over the next few days.

If you have any queries about WPF Themes, or want help or advice with making your own themes then we would love to hear from you. Simply put a comment up on our WPF Themes support forum.
Happy styling =)