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The ligthspeed designer is definately one of the better ORM designers that I've worked with, but there's still room for improvement. Here are some things that would be nice to see in the next release of lightspeed:
The above may sound critical, but then again Lightspeed is definately the best ORM on the market, so I'm keen to see it become even better! |
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If you don't mind me adding to your list... The BIGGEST annoyance for me is the "Arrange" command, it arrange entities to be all over the place. |
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Hello Mark and Joe, Thanks for the great feedback and for taking the time to write up all these ideas. * Copy, Cut and Paste of all entity properties. We do support this, but only for a single entity property at a time. (It's a bit non-obvious because it's only on the Edit menu; we don't repeat it on the right-click menu). It looks like we don't currently have it for multiple properties but I'll log a feature request for that. So that we can prioritise, could you let us know if multiple property paste a common scenario for you? Thanks! * The empty Add sub-menu is unfortunately a Visual Studio issue. We know it's annoying but we're not aware of anything we can do to address it (at least not without more effort than we feel is justified). Sorry. Inconsistency in placing of menus is also at least partly a Visual Studio issue, but we'll see if we can improve this. * Sorted drop lists -- great point and I'll log a feature request for this. * Custom ID types and identity properties. We don't offer CK types in the Identity Type drop-down because we present those in a different way, namely the multi-key Identity section on the entity surface. I realise this arguably falls foul of your comments about inconsistency (because for entity properties you would indeed choose a custom type from the drop-down); but because the CK type is usually inferred from the database, and rarely needs to be customised or shared, I think this is actually more convenient. Now this still doesn't address general custom types in the Identity Type drop-down (e.g. Int16s or Decimals or whatever). We're certainly open to supporting custom identity types if it would be useful to you, or if you think it would be useful as an additional option for composite key handling -- please let us know your use case! Thanks! Re creating multi-key identities yourself, you can do this, but it is deliberately not made obvious. We don't want people to use CKs unless they're dealing with an existing database, in which case drag and drop is the usual idiom. So it's there if people really really need it or if they're already using CKs, but deliberately not front and centre. (If you do really really need it, the trick is to right-click the entity in the LightSpeed Model explorer and choose "Add New Identity Property.") * Extract to value object. In fact, this does support multiple selection, but it works a bit oddly because it was originally designed for database-first scenarios. We assumed that the user had brought in a flat bunch of columns but wanted to add some structure to the object model. In this case, the columns had to share a common prefix (this is LightSpeed's convention for mapping value objects to columns). So the designer only offers "Extract to Value Object" if the selected properties share a common prefix (see attached picture), because it deems that they couldn't be mapped otherwise. So that's the background. But you're right that this doesn't actually fit that well with the way a lot of people use the designer. A lot of customers are modelling in the designer, rather than in their database tools. And in that scenario the requirement for the common prefix is confusing and unhelpful. The common prefix is an artefact of the database mapping: if you're creating entities in the designer, you shouldn't have to think about this convention except when pushing changes to the database. So I agree, we should fix Extract to Value Object to support this workflow. Thank you for bringing a fresh set of eyes to this! * Arrange craziness. Again I can only confess that we delegate this to Visual Studio and we are reliant on VS' arrange algorithm. We do get a lot of feedback about this so maybe it's time to bite the bullet and see if we can implement something a bit smarter. Thanks once again for the feedback and suggestions -- we really appreciate you helping us to improve the product in this way! |
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Thanks Ivan! Really appreciate the detailed response! :-) Is there plan to refresh the overall designer user experience for the VS2010 release? |
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Hi, I've been reading up on the documentation and going through some samples to get up to speed. 1. I'd agree with Save Arrangements (bite the bullet and allow each dB table to be specified with a location and size). Hopefully you guys can do this using a SOA approach since VS lacks the ability. 2. Is there any road map to implement N-Level Undo? 3. I see theres a couple unit tests included in some of the samples (NUnit one's). With some frameworks such as CSLA there are limitations to Mocking (well Dependancy Injection) so you can only use TypeMock, is it safe to assume LightSpeed will support most mocking frameworks in the future? 4. I'm sure this is available I'm looking for Cascade INSERTS for unit/integration/functional/perf testing. ie Insert records into related tables (thru the dB's dependancy tree) and record Id's of the inserted records to test UPDATES, SELECTS and DELETES on a PROD dB. Is there some extension methods on properties of an Entity, "bool IsDBColumn(this propName)", "Entity IsForeignKey(this propName)", etc I'm missing? 5. On your Support Forum when you do a search and goto a page, there is no existing Search Textbox to search again, it'd be great if you could add a search box to forum threads. Plus I think most people would prefer to be taken to an anchor in the page rather than click "View complete thread". 6. Is there a automatic VS2008/10 referencing updater and a rollback function. So if your customers use the latest nightly build each day (automatically) they can spot/report things that might adversely affect there projects (primarily errors gained overnight by using the latest) that aren't covered in your tests? 7. A sample for Silverlight would be awesome! Just a side note, it was really suprising when I went through the WinForm sample, you know the MVP WebForm pattern Damian Edwards did and Tatham Oddie and some other Readify guys are enhancing, the code looks almost exactly the same as what you guys have written.
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