Quick news & near-time plans

During last few weeks I've been working really hard - that's why I constantly avoided posting any new info here - even although v4.3.5 was published. Another reason is my dissatisfaction in new DataObjects.Net v4.3.5 installer - I've been replacing it during may be each 3 days starting from the beginning of September, and there are still some things to improve there.

I'm not happy just because of installer - the version of DO bundled there is definitely better then v4.3.1, i.e. if you use v4.3.1, it's strongly recommended to upgrade.

But if you're just trying DO, this version might bring some new complexities. In this version, I migrated all our web projects to new web.config for IIS 7 / ASP.NET 4 with integrated pipeline - I thought it's a good idea, since that's what recommended. And this become a source of a set of problems:

• New web projects can be hosted only by IIS 7 - not by ASP.NET Development Server.
• You must install additional components to even open such projects in VS2010/2008.
• You must be logged in as administrator to work with such projects. I'm curious, why Microsoft doesn't fix such issues ASAP?
• And finally, impersonation doesn't work in this mode. So you should enable ASP.NET 4.0 application pool identity to login to "DO40-Tests" database on SQL Server.

All these issues aren't fixed yet. I suspect, the only good way is to switch back to classic pipeline mode. On the other hand, few other annoying issues related to DO4 installation (like need to manually create "DO40-Tests" database and manually update connection URLs in samples) should anyway be fixed. That's why we're going to spent nearest 2 weeks on improving initial user experience. Some steps are already done - e.g. newer releases will include help files, that can be integrated into VS2010 Help Library:

And certainly, we'll work on manual - all new features (and some existing) must be described there.

P.S. Today I'll publish one more post describing the improvements we've made in v4.3.5.