LightSpeed

• Fix for one-to-one association join chain in LINQ Where clauses
• Added support for negated boolean expressions in LINQ Any and All
• Fixed a memory leak with compiled FindById queries
• Validation errors now provide access to the validation rule instance
• Include schema in auto-joined tables being joined by an identifier expression
• Fixed automatic date-time range validation for Oracle
• Improved support for SQL Server 2008 TIME data type
• Fixed an issue where a query with criteria on the left and a logical combination on the right could be processed incorrectly
• Fix for DeletedOn column being incorrectly aliased in update/delete queries
• Added support for deleting by LINQ query
• Added Procedure and Scale options to ProcedureParameter class
• Fix for procedure parameters of user-defined types in designer being generated into wrapper function signatures as object instead of strongly typed
• Fix for value objects not being handled correctly in batch updates
• Fixed exception if you put DiscriminatorAttribute on a root entity class
• We now raise an exception if a SQL Server stored procedure calls RAISERROR (sic: what is this, guys, Fortran?) after performing a successful SELECT (previously only errors raised before the SELECT would cause exceptions)
• Added a property for migration code to access the connection string of the database being migrated
• When a stored procedure sets an out parameter to SQL NULL, we now translate this to CLR null instead of leaving it as DBNull.Value (this fixes casting errors in strong-typed wrapper methods)
• Fix for virtual (non-mapped) discriminators not being populated on insert
• Entity- and interface-level query filtering (in progress and subject to change)

Web Workbench

• Collapsing support for non-top-level regions
• Sass and Less Format Document command
• Fixed issue in Sass compilation if install path included non-ANSI characters
• Fixed JavaScript minifier mangling non-ANSI characters
• Upgraded CoffeeScript compiler to 1.2.0
• CoffeeScript comment highlighting fixes
• Comment/uncomment block support
• Performance improvements when making many deletes from a document
• Error checking and signature help for Sass and Less built-in functions

WPF Elements

• Continuing improvements to control themes
• Fixes for potential issues in TimeExplorer, Chart, ChartAxis and PieSeries
• Added option for rounding on lost focus in NumericTextBox
• Added ResetZoom command for charts
• MajorTickSpacing now keeps consistent tick density as user zooms
• Added PieSeries.SelectedDataPointChanged event
• Improvements to automatic bar chart width calculation
• Fixed error when changing chart highlight mode
• Fixed an issue with horizontal bar charts using categories along the Y axis
• Resolved a DataGrid issue
• Fixed foreground colours not being respected in CurrencyTextBox
• Fixed potential null reference error when changing DataGrid.ItemsSource
• Fixed some issues with chart default axes

WPF Diagrams

• Added TreeLayoutAlgorithm
• Fixed null reference error in ConnectionPointThumb
• Fixed a diagram binding issue
• Fix for a bug that was stealing mouse wheel and scroll events
• Added an option to turn off infinite scrolling

NHibernate Designer

• Added support for NHibernate sql-insert, sql-update and sql-delete overrides
• Added support for stored procedures and named SQL queries

SimpleDB Management Tools

• No longer need to click away from a row to ensure it is saved

As usual you can get the latest nightly builds from the Downloads page (free editions) or the store (full editions).

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For a limited time, pay only $699 and you’ll receive:

• LightSpeed O/R Mapper (normally $349)
• WPF Elements (normally $699)
• WPF Diagrams (normally $699)
• Silverlight Elements (normally $699)
• Phone Elements for WP7 (normally $299)
• NHibernate Designer (normally $99)
• SimpleDB Management Tools (normally $29)
• Web Workbench (normally $29)
• Visual Tools for SharePoint (normally $349)

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• 12 months of new releases, nightly builds and new products!
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LightSpeed

• Fixes for a couple of issues with cascading deletes into and through a class table inheritance hierarchy
• Fix for a join issue
• Backstop for when an indirect circular association could lead to a stack overflow
• Optimisation to avoid saving unmodified foreign keys when performing a partial update
• Ensure that a nullable foreign key is nulled out when the association is nulled out through a cascade delete
• Designer support for ForeignKeyFieldAttribute on one-to-one associations

Silverlight Elements

• Fixed some localisation bugs in the scheduler control

WPF Diagrams

• We’ve added a hook that allows you to keep the same element IDs when deserialising and re-serialising a diagram
• Added some options to simplify toolbox styling
• Added an option to the A* pathfinder to avoid parallel connection overlaps

Web Workbench

• We’ve fixed an issue where some users were getting a “custom tool failed” error after rebooting
• Added support for functions as mixin arguments
• Added support for Sass @each loops

SimpleDB Management Tools

• Added export to XML

As usual, free editions from the downloads page, retail editions from the store, and VS2010 extensions from the Updates tab in Extension Manager.

The export function respects the current filter so you can enter a SELECT statement to export a subset of your domain. At the moment we only support exporting to XML, but if you want us to add export to other formats then just drop us a line in the forum and we’ll see what we can do.

For VS2010 users, the new build is available now from the Visual Studio Gallery — just jump into Extension Manager, click the updates tab and wait for a minute while Visual Studio goes “No updates available! No updates available! No up– oh, look, here’s one!” For VS2008 users, it will be available from the Mindscape store in about 12 hours’ time. Enjoy!

LightSpeed

• Added the option to create a blank migration if there are no changes to apply, and a command to clear all proposed deltas so you can code them by hand from scratch instead of modifying the designer generated ones
• Fixed an error in Visual Studio if you try to run a migrations project which contains no migrations
• Updated the SQLite provider to 1.0.74, and switched back to mixed mode assembly.
• Fixed MySQL extractor to infer tinyint(1) as boolean. Again
• Fixed a LINQ error with queries of the form Where(x => x.Assoc.Id…)
• Changed how uniqueness validation works when the unique field is declared on a non-leaf class in a STI hierarchy

Web Workbench

We’ve made a number of fixes around spurious syntax errors on CSS selectors and the like. We know there are still a few more to go so please let us know if you still see spurious syntax errors!

We’ve made a couple of other fixes to do with processing of Sass and Less imports, and around outlining of Sass and Less files. We’ve also improved the presentation of Sass compiler error messages.

SimpleDB Management Tools

• Fix for the list of domains being truncated if you had more than 100 domains

Note: This sale has now ended.

For our friends in the northern hemisphere it’s that time of the year – it’s warming up and there’s a holiday approaching. We thought it would be a great time to offer a special for the summer so that you have a great toolbox at your disposal for when you’re coding away on the beach.

Here’s the deal:

For the price of our WPF or Silverlight suites you can get a full Mindscape Mega Pack upgrade at no extra charge! And to save you money in the long run we’ll also add an additional six months of updates! Now that will afford you a few extra Mojitos!

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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.

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

We’re pleased to announce that you can now install our VS File Explorer and SimpleDB Management Tools products through Extension Manager. Fire up Tools > Extension Manager, click Online Gallery, and type “mindscape file explorer” or “mindscape simpledb tools” into the search box, click Download and voila!

But it gets better! Previously we had separate Free and Professional editions of SimpleDB Management Tools. We’ve now got rid of those two editions. Instead, there’s now a single edition of SimpleDB Management Tools 2010, which you can download for free. This gives you the old Professional behaviour for 14 days, then if you don’t purchase a licence reverts to the old Trial behaviour (limiting you to 20 search results). To buy a licence and keep the unrestricted behaviour, you can just click a link within the product — no need to download a separate retail version and reinstall!

Finally, a handy tip: if you have Microsoft’s Visual Studio Pro Power Tools installed, it will periodically check for updates for all your extensions. It’s free and has lots of other goodies in as well — and it’s a one-click install through Extension Manager. Check it out!

Here, then, is a round-up of the last week or so’s fixes and enhancements across the Mindscape product range.

LightSpeed

• Visual Studio 2010 designer support! We’ll be officially launching this soon, but it’s already in the nightlies.
• Support for using SQL Server spatial data type methods in a query. Instructions here.
• Consistent read support for Amazon SimpleDB. Instructions here and here.
• Support for localising field names in validation messages. Instructions here.
• You can now add (but not remove) unique constraints via the designer and via migrations.
• The designer now remembers the zoom level when you save the model. Handy for big models where you usually want to work zoomed out.
• Fixes for a spurious error in the designer, for Oracle SYS_GUID support in the designer and for entity range variables in LINQ joins.
• Fixed a British spelling in the help file. Hey, you may think this isn’t worth mentioning, but JD brooded about it for six straight days…

Silverlight Elements

• New OutlookBar control.
• New Expander control.
• New menuing and command controls: Menu, ContextMenu and SplitButton.
• New numeric controls: Slider, DualSlider, DualProgressBar and NumericUpDown.
• New layout controls: DockPanel and a pair of truncating StackPanels.
• TimePicker and TimeSpanPicker now have up-down functionality.
• Several fixes to design-time functionality and to the UniformGrid.

WPF Property Grid

• Fix for TypeEditors mapped to built-in editors not respecting BuiltInEditorStyles.

SimpleDB Management Tools

• Visual Studio 2010 support.
• Now uses consistent reads for all queries.
• Old-style query syntax (Amazon’s Crazy-Ass Query Language (TM)) is no longer supported.

You can download the latest nightly builds from the store, or from the Downloads page for free and trial editions.