DataObjects.Net v4.0 final is out

DataObjects.Net v4.0 final is published in downloads section of our web site.

Most important changes we've made last month include:

1. Schema upgrade API. Shortly it will be fully described @ wiki, for now you can try out Upgrade Sample. There are 3 applications representing different versions of the same one. They must be run sequentially except the first one (it recreates the database), although you can try running them in order.

Upgrade API is really simple. To gracefully handle an upgrade, you must:

- Add AssemblyInfo attribute to AssemblyInfo.cs file: [assembly: AssemblyInfo("MyAssembly", "2.0")]

- Extend UpgradeHandler in each changed model assembly - it will assist to upgrade its structures.

- If necessary, override its AddUpgradeHints method and add instances of UpgradeHint ancestors there: RenameFieldHint, CopyFieldHint, RenameTypeHint. Note that upgrade hints are model-level hints, not schema-level.

- If necessary, apply [Recycled] attribute to some of your types and fields and override it OnUpgrade method to implement custom data migration logic from recycled structures there.

All these steps are shown in upgrade sample.

As you may find, UpgradeHandler offers more extension points, and there are schema-level upgrade hints as well. Normally they shouldn't be used - we translate our model-level hints to schema-level hints automatically. But some of them can be useful - for example, IgnoreHint instructing schema comparison layer to skip the specified schema object.

2. Refactored LINQ translator. Almost no differences outside (it passes just few more new tests), but a huge set of them inside. Faster, much simpler and eaisier to extend. Did I mention we're going to support custom LINQ extensions? Well, this version allows us to implement this gracefully.

3. Refactored mapping attributes. Since we've been shipping final, this became rather important. Details can be found here; new samples reflect this. Wiki will be updated in accordance shortly.

4. Improved installer & documentation

- Regular build installer now contains all downloadable prerequisites integrated

- VS.NET project template now contains much less references

- Brief version of class reference is provided @ help.x-tensive.com and installed as .Chm. Full version (.HxS) is integrated into VS.NET help collection.

Other important changes:

- Domain & Session events

- Improved PropertyConstraintAspect - now custom error message can be specified right in the attribute declaration

- New validators. See inheritors of PropertyConstraintAspect.

- We decided to get rid of VistaDB support. Earlier it was easy because of its good compatibility with SQL Server, but now it becomes more and more complex. There are actually many differences - normally acceptable for humans, but making much more complex machine translation for it. Our LINQ implementation and schema upgrade API provide very high level of compatibility between different RDBMS, and this compatibility costs a lot. So we'll focus on more frequently used RDBMS (Oracle, MySQL); furthermore, presence of our own memory provider and upcoming file system provider makes support of embedded databases much less necessary.

Public issue tracker is open

And finally, during the last month we've been using issue tracker on Google code (btw, it is really good). So all we did is easy to expose now: check out "Done" grid for v4.0 final. Previous changes are related to "Pre4.0" milestone, so they aren't shown here. Quicks statistics:

- 25 defects

- 14 new features

- 9 enchancements

- 9 refactorings

- 9 non-coding tasks.

Total: 66 issues.

If you're interested in near future, take a look at similar grid for v4.1. Some features mentioned here (mainly, fixes & tasks) will be separated to v4.0.5, which will be available in ~ 2 weeks.

And as I mentioned, from this point we're switching to monthly release cycle. So v4.1 can be expected in the first half of July.