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LightSpeed 4 Beta now available!

That’s right! Kicking off 2011 in style, we’re excited to announce that we have started shipping nightly builds of LightSpeed 4 Beta! LightSpeed 4 Beta is available to current LightSpeed 3 customers now.

What’s new with LightSpeed 4?

The primary focus of LightSpeed 4 has been on distributed enhancements – helping get your data get where it needs to be with LightSpeed taking care of all the hard work. We posted about some of the highlight features for distributed solutions in an earlier blog post, but the highlights: Distributed Entities, DistributedUnitOfWork, RIA Services, DTO mapping improvements and much more!

There’s plenty of other great things coming with LightSpeed 4 and we will be sure to be posting about them in the coming weeks.

We’d love to hear from you!

To help make this the best release of LightSpeed ever we would love to hear your feedback on LightSpeed 4 Beta. Fire us an email, post in the forum, poke us on twitter – whatever way you want, we want to hear your feedback. Bug reports, feature suggestions – anything.

Download it now!

Current LightSpeed customers can download immediately from their account page. Look for “LightSpeed 4 Beta Program”. The nightly builds will be available under the files for this product. If you’re not yet a customer, go and check out the free version of LightSpeed 3.11 and see what you’re missing out on! :-)

Notes for the beta

If you’re using the beta, please remember:

• Uninstall any existing installations of LightSpeed before installing the Beta.
• LightSpeed 4 does not install side by side with LightSpeed 3.
• There have been changes to DTO generation so if you’re testing a solution that uses DTO’s please get in touch if you have any issues.

Have fun!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is here!

The worst kept secret in Mindscape history is out — we’re proud to announce the release of Silverlight Elements 2.0, a major new version of our suite of controls for Microsoft’s Silverlight application and media platform!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is packed with components that support common business functionality, make for more convenient user interaction or just make your application look cool.

SPECIAL: Read about our limited time special offer!

Silverlight Elements – for the line of business

The big new feature in Silverlight Elements 2.0 is charting. Create great-looking charts in minutes, and pimp them out from the extensive gallery of sample styles.

Silverlight Elements includes bar, line, spline, area, spline area, pie, doughnut, scatter and bubble charts, plus stacked variants of the bar, line, area, spline and spline area charts. These choices make it easy for you to create visualisations that help business users rapidly absorb, assess and compare information.

Click to see full size

Silverlight Elements charting is fully idiomatic Silverlight, supporting data binding, styling and templating. You can use styles and templates to customise the appearance of chart elements such as bars, symbols, lines, axes, data labels and legends. You can even use data-dependent styling, for example to highlight values that fall above or below the expected range. Full data binding support means you can use Silverlight charts against existing business objects. What’s more, if you bind a chart to an observable data source, it will update in real time — a painless way to ensure your users are always working with the most current data!

There’s not room here to talk about all the other cool features, like multiple Y axes, axis scaling, stripey backgrounds and support for massive data sets, but we’ll be posting lots of examples over the coming days. Watch this space!

While charting is the big new feature, Silverlight Elements also includes a bunch of other controls that are useful in business scenarios, such as the popular Scheduler control, list and tree-list views, and many more.

Silverlight Elements – for your users

Although Silverlight is a great platform for building rich user experiences, the set of controls it comes with is fairly basic. Silverlight Elements includes a bunch of components that you can use to improve the navigability and usability of your application. Users are familiar with idioms like menus, expanders and split buttons, and with Silverlight Elements they can have them!

Click to see full size

In addition, Silverlight Elements provides a number of familiar controls from the Windows and Office environments, such as color pickers, time pickers, a numeric up-down spinner, an Outlook-style navigation bar and many more, to help your users get up and running with your application as quickly as possible!

Silverlight Elements – for looking good

If there’s one thing better than an application which does the job and makes it easy, it’s an application which does the job, makes it easy and looks great doing it. With Silverlight Elements, you can use controls such as CoverFlow and Book to create engaging, tactile user interfaces which users love to interact with.

Better still, Silverlight Elements ships with five themes, allowing you to easily achieve an attractive, modern Office- or Expression-style look in your application.

Silverlight Elements – for free goodies!

As part of Silverlight Elements 2.0, we’re making three controls — CoverFlow, Book and Expander — available for FREE! Just download the free edition of Silverlight Elements and you can use these controls to your heart’s content without paying one red cent.

The free edition also includes evaluation versions of all the other controls so you can try them out and see how they can help you to build great applications.

We’re also offering a special bonus to customers who purchase the full version in the next two weeks: a $100 discount and a free copy of Laurent’s Bugnion’s book Silverlight 4 Unleashed (the proper dead tree edition you can keep on your desk, not a PDF!).

Silverlight Elements – get it now!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is available now — grab the free edition and take it for a spin, or head for the store to take advantage of the limited time discount and free book offer. Happy coding!

Coming soon: Charts for Silverlight & WPF

I wanted to give a sneak preview of some great new capabilities that we’re currently developing for WPF and Silverlight. In the coming months we will be releasing a suite of charting controls for both our Silverlight Elements and WPF Elements product lines.

Here’s some examples of what will be possible. Note that these are early screen grabs from our simple test harness – it’s only part of the story, and we’ll have more to say in the future as we get closer to a release. Obviously charting is about much more than just the visuals so we’re working hard to ensure that developers have a great experience with the controls – databinding support through out, infinite restyling and templating ability, animation support and more. Everything you would expect from tools designed and built specifically for the platform.

A simple line series graph showing various styles for lines and automatic legend generation for the various series.

A simple bar graph with category axis support in use.

3D bar graph – customising and styling the look and feel of your charts is easy with the flexibility of styles and templating in Silverlight and WPF.

Data labels can be displayed to make values more clear for the consumer. Data labels can be trigger to display on mouse over, all at once or however you would like. The display style is completely customisable.

A simple pie chart with lighting effects applied.

Doughnut charts are supported. They’re also delicious when consumed fresh from the bakery with sugar on top.

This marks the end of a short glimpse of what’s under development for the WPF Elements and Silverlight Elements products. We appreciate any feedback as it will directly impact the product development. As mentioned earlier, these are alpha screenshots and you can customise the look and feel considerably more than we have shown here (as they’re all being rendered from our test harness the legend, title, etc is all displayed in the same place with the same colours – this isn’t necessary! :-)

So when can I get my hands on this?

If you’re a Silverlight Elements customer, we’ll be rolling out the charts into the nightly builds soon. We’ve elected to start with supporting Silverlight as the Silverlight API is far more primitive than WPF and it will make releasing the WPF version shortly after we finalise the Silverlight version much easier. We will be posting updates to the blog in future when parts become available to play with (you can subscribe to the blog here if you use an RSS reader).

Migrating to SimpleDB

This post is about what to consider when making the move from a traditional RDBMS to Amazon’s SimpleDB data store. As you may be aware, LightSpeed supports working with SimpleDB along with traditional databases so we get questions about migration every now and then and I wanted to gather thoughts on this in one place. LightSpeed provides many benefits to .NET developers wanting to work with SimpleDB so following any general point I’ll be mentioning how LightSpeed can aid in migration.

SimpleDB does not have data types

Unlike when you define a schema in a traditional database, in SimpleDB everything is one type – string. Want to set decimal precision? No luck. Want to set a maximum field length? Go away. This is not to say that having no data types beyond string is necessarily a bad thing, it is simply something that you need to keep in mind when planning a migration to SimpleDB.

How LightSpeed helps: Despite everything being a string, you define your domain model using CLR types (decimal, int, datetime, etc). The nice thing about this is that LightSpeed will take care of the data conversion for you without you needing to worry. If your model has a decimal on it and we get some string back from SimpleDB, we’ll convert it on the fly to the CLR decimal that you actually want to be working with. We also format things so that numeric and date comparisons still work even though SimpleDB supports only lexical comparisons.

No Stored Procedures

There’s not much more to say here other than they’re not supported and I doubt they ever will be. You’ll need to drop stored procedures and use dynamic querying. But hey – you’re in NoSQL land now, surely you’re one of the cool kids who doesn’t like Stored Procedures anyway right? :-) The same goes for much of the database infrastructure that you may be used to – triggers, auditing, etc, does not exist with SimpleDB. It is a simple data store.

SimpleDB does not have foreign keys or relationships.

SimpleDB does not have a notion of FK’s or associations/relationships. You can still have CustomerID on a ShoppingCart, but it won’t have referential integrity enforced at the database level.

How LightSpeed helps: LightSpeed is a convention driven ORM and will pick up that properties named [Type]Id are probably meant to be associations. If you have really funky naming, you’ll need to wire up the associations manually but that’s a one off effort. LightSpeed can then manage the constraints (one to many, many to one, one to one, many to many).

However, SimpleDB doesn’t support joins or multi-statement queries or anything like that. So one thing that LightSpeed can’t do relationship-wise is eager loading. All associations are lazy-loaded: given SimpleDB latency, the n+1 problem can cause significant performance issues. LightSpeed caching can help here.

SimpleDB does not have field constraints

Currently using a unique constraint on a database field to make sure you don’t get duplicates? That won’t fly in SimpleDB. You’ll need to make sure that you’re checking uniqueness (or any other type of constraint you want to enforce) at the application layer, not at the database layer.

How LightSpeed helps: LightSpeed includes many validations such as uniqueness checking – as well as many more – that mean you don’t need to do the constraint enforcement at the database level. This has many advantages beyond plugging the holes in SimpleDB, for example if you have a uniqueness validation failure it’s much easier to present the user with a meaningful error message about the given entity rather than having to handle an insert error message. Again, though, you’ll want to watch out for possible performance implications — a uniqueness validation incurs a round-trip to SimpleDB every time an entity is validated.

SimpleDB is likely slower than your relational database

We’re not saying SimpleDB isn’t web scale, but more that your queries are now performed as HTTP requests. There is an inherent latency in this which is unlikely to exist in a traditional server solution (where the database may be on the same machine, or on the same network segment meaning it’s extremely fast to query). This is a general consideration when looking at the move to SimpleDB. Amazon have been working to improve this situation in various ways – batching of inserts & updates, faster querying if you’re issuing calls from within the Amazon hosting environment (calls to SimpleDB are faster if undertaken from an EC2 instance in the same data center).

How LightSpeed helps: By abstracting away your querying and passing it to LightSpeed you can work with us to support new scenarios with SimpleDB. For example, one user noticed a performance issue that we could solve with a new feature added by Amazon – batched puts. By adding this support into LightSpeed any SimpleDB user working through LightSpeed could simply update to the latest version to get the performance benefits of batched puts. If you handwrite your queries for SimpleDB you would need to manually go through your code base and update to support the new features of SimpleDB as they are released.

LightSpeed caching can also help with data that changes relatively infrequently such as reference data.

This sums up some of the key differences you are likely to encounter when dealing with SimpleDB. We’ve worked hard to try and make LightSpeed abstract away some of the inconsistencies associated with using SimpleDB in your projects and hope that it eases transition between any data store that LightSpeed supports. Interested in testing out SimpleDB for yourself? Grab these tools:

Mindscape LightSpeed
Mindscape SimpleDB Management Tools

Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010 released!

We’ve gone all enterprisy with our latest release – Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010. In fact, we’re so enterprisy that this is our slowest release to date – we actually finished developing this product several months ago and gave it out to a bunch of users to work with. Nothing like being slow to feel enterprise ready!

Jokes aside, we’re pleased to get this release out and into the hands of our users. Like all our products, there’s a free version that you can grab and start playing with right away.

So what does Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010 actually do?

It helps developers who want to work with LINQ-to-SharePoint, a new feature in SharePoint 2010. Unfortunately, if you’re wanting to do that then you need to work with some awkward command line tools to build up a model. Thankfully, visual modelling is something we have a bunch of experience with so we thought we could give developers a better way to work with LINQ-to-SharePoint models. It will save developers a heap of time when working with LINQ-to-SharePoint by generating LINQ classes and data contexts for SharePoint lists. If you don’t work with SharePoint 2010, or have any interest in LINQ-to-SharePoint then this product isn’t for you sorry!

There’s also the ability to nicely synchronize your model from your SharePoint store if you’re making rapid changes to your SharePoint list structure:

It’s also our first product that has any connection to the insanely successful SharePoint product. We’re looking forward to hearing what sorts of interaction you would like to have with SharePoint from within Visual Studio so that we can roll out new features into this product (hence we didn’t limit the name to only talking about LINQ-to-SharePoint).

Pricing and trial

We’re retailing Visual Tools for SharePoint at $349 USD which includes 12 months of updates like all Mindscape purchases. Click here to visit the store. Trial editions can be downloaded from here.

We’d love to get your feedback and, as mentioned, if there’s anything else you’d like us to do with SharePoint let us know either in the comments or in our forums.