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Archive for September, 2010

Nightly news, 1 October 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, Silverlight Elements

A late update this week, as the Mindscape North intertubes have been at the bottom of a river since midday yesterday. Here’s what’s been happening.

Silverlight Elements

• Millions and billions and kazillions of new charts! Check them out!

LightSpeed

• Fix for incorrect re-aliasing during nested table usage
• Fix for eager loading of ninja associations
• lsgen no longer generates associations whose foreign key has been excluded
• We’ve added subexpression support for “remove by query”
• You can now customise the “plural name” used by the designer to generate LINQ query properties
• DateTime validation now allows you to go right up to DateTime.MaxValue (or, for Doctor Who fans, “the END… of TIME!!!”)

Get ‘em from the usual places, because when they’re gone, they’re gone!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 30 September 2010

New Silverlight charting capabilities

Tagged as Silverlight, Silverlight Elements

As you may know from following this blog, we’ve been releasing parts of our Silverlight Charting controls on a nightly basis with Silverlight Elements. Last week I talked about the initial charts – Line, Bar, Pie and Doughnut. Keeping up with almost live-blogging the changes as they’re being released, today I’m pleased to announce some of the new chart types that are available immediately to Silverlight Elements users.

Some of the new features include:

• Legend placement improvements to make it easier to place the legend
• Logarithmic axis scale support
• Pie chart selection options (light one part, pull it out, expand all slices, etc)

And of course the new charts which, I think, are best described with visuals…

Bubble charts:

Multiple bubble series:

Stacked line area charts:

Stacked bar series:

Stacked bar series with a custom bar style:

Stacked bar series in horizontal orientation:

Scatter charts:

Multiple scatter charts:

Stacked line charts:

Spline charts (Smooths the line):

Stacked spline charts:

Stacked spine area charts:

Phew – not bad for a weekly update I don’t think! :-) We have been asked if using the charting is currently supported – absolutely. They’re not completely finished, but if you do use them and have feedback or find bugs then we’ll be there to help you out so please – dig in :-)

You can try the charts with the trial of Silverlight Elements or if you’re a customer, grab your nightly build from the store here.

What would you like to see next?

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 28 September 2010

Spatial data queries in LightSpeed

Tagged as LightSpeed

LightSpeed, unlike lesser object-relational mappers, supports properties of SQL Server 2008 spatial data types. You can drag a table with geography or geometry columns into the LightSpeed designer, and party on the generated SqlGeography and SqlGeometry properties to your heart’s content.

But what if you want to perform spatial queries on those columns? For example, what if you want to find all the walruses within a given distance of a particular penguin? (Because examples involving restaurants are boring. That’s why.) Well, LightSpeed supports that too, but you’ll need to teach it about the spatial methods you want to use.

As we’ve discussed before, you can use the ServerFunctionDescriptor.Register method to map a CLR function to a SQL function. However, the SQL Server 2008 spatial methods aren’t normal SQL functions: they’re member functions of SQLCLR types.

Fortunately, you can still use the same technique to map the SqlGeography and SqlGeometry methods to their server-side equivalents. You just need to put a dot in front of the server-side method name to tell LightSpeed to map it as a member method instead of a T-SQL function:

MethodInfo method = typeof(SqlGeography).GetMethod("STDistance");
ServerFunctionDescriptor.Register(method, ".STDistance");  // note the all-important dot!

And now you can write the following LINQ query:

var menaces = from w in unitOfWork.Walrus
              where w.Location.STDistance(penguin.Location).Value < distance
              select w;

And it will get translated into a server-side query just as you’d hope!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 27 September 2010

Nightly news, 24 September 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, NHibernate Designer, SimpleDB Management Tools

The big news this week is, of course, the beta release of Silverlight charting — check it out! And the other big news this week is the spiffy Silverlight book control — check that out too! Meanwhile, though, back in the salt mines we’ve also shipped a few less glamorous enhancements and fixes.

NHibernate Designer

• If you’ve drag on a table with two one-to-many associations, we’ll now try to guess unambiguous names for the two associations.

SimpleDB Management Tools

• Fixed an issue that could cause errors when dragging into LightSpeed in VS2010.

LightSpeed

• If you’ve drag on a table with two one-to-many associations, we’ll now try to guess unambiguous names for… wait, is there an echo in here?
• Fixed an issue in the PostgreSQL Server Explorer add-in that could cause errors when dragging into LightSpeed in VS2010… no, seriously, is there an echo?
• Added LINQ support for DateTime.AddSeconds, AddMinutes, AddHours, AddMilliseconds, AddDays, AddMonths and AddYears.
• Added support for simple calculations and method calls in a LINQ ‘let’ clause.

As always, grab the free editions from the downloads page or the retail editions from the store.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 23 September 2010

Silverlight Book control released!

Tagged as Silverlight, Silverlight Elements

Wow, Silverlight Elements is getting some attention lately! Yesterday we announced that charting controls were being rolled into the nightly builds and today I’m excited to announce the inclusion of our Silverlight Book Control. This is a great control for presenting readable data in a manner that is familiar to people while at the same time being flexible enough for developers to host any content they want. So you can host images, text, scheduler controls, 3D spinning cubes, whatever you want – and still get the nice smooth animating page flip effects.

Here’s some pretty pictures:

Standard view of the book open at pages 6 & 7.

Turning a page in the book control is visually beautiful, feeling like a real book. Either drag pages over or simply click to flip fast.

Turning a page backwards. The pages are complete databindable, supporting any content you may want to show in the book.

Jason started developing this control some months ago in the evenings for fun and we loved it so much that it’s now being included in our official Silverlight control suite!

Check out the whole Silverlight Elements suite here which includes many other controls to make your applications sing and dance.

Note: The book control is in the current nightly builds so you will need to grab it from the nightly build page, or if you’re one of our much loved customers, you can grab it from your store page here.

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 22 September 2010