LightSpeed 2.1 Released!

Tagged as General, LightSpeed, Products

Here it is, LightSpeed 2.1 is fresh from the oven and ready for download!

A quick run-through of the changes:

Search Engine

Want full text search? Your database engine doesn’t support it? LightSpeed 2.1 is here to help.

Shipping with LightSpeed 2.1 is a full provider-model based full text search engine built on the fantastic Lucene.Net search engine. This means that the full text search is completely independent of your choice in database and has incredible performance.

Query query = new Query();
query.SearchQuery = "video";
 
using (var unitOfWork = LightSpeedContext.BeginUnitOfWork())
{
  unitOfWork.Find<Comment>(query);
}

More advanced search engine capabilities exist, for example, being able to search over multiple entity types at once, perform a query that matches between the search index and data only stored in your database (e.g. “find me all entities that have the word ‘car’ in them and who have an owner id of 99″).

We’re excited to see how users will make use of this functionality and appreciate any feedback on this new feature and your ability to perform Google-style queries with your object relational mapper.

The search provider infrastructure is extensible so if you don’t want to use Lucene.Net you are welcome to plug-in your own full text search provider.

VistaDB, Firebird and SQL Server Compact Support

Adding to the existing databases that LightSpeed supports, now you can work with VistaDB, Firebird and SQL Server Compact Edition.

Designer Improvements

We have been blown away by the feedback on our Visual Studio 2008 integration – much of it has been praise along the lines of “wow – a designer that doesn’t suck!” but with all the different databases and versions out there, some folks have run into issues with their particular databases. We’ve heard that feedback and been incorporating it throughout the life span of LightSpeed 2.0, with the result that the designer in 2.1 is faster, smarter and more robust, so that the out-of-the-box experience for developers is as hassle free as possible.

We’ve also rounded out designer support for the core LightSpeed feature set, and added the ability for projects to use their own custom templates for generating the entity code.

Delete and update queries

Previously when deleting data you were required to retrieve an entity and then delete it with a unit of work. Fetching data just to delete it went against our performance focused view of the world so we made things more efficient – simply pass in a query and delete all data matching that query. The old mechanism still exists for backward compatibility but if you’re eager to keep making your code as fast as possible, you now have more options.

var query = new Query(typeof(Contribution)) {Identifier = 1};
 
_unitOfWork.Remove(query);
_unitOfWork.SaveChanges(true);

There’s a similar feature for updates, which allows you to modify database data without having to download it into an entity.

Many more little tweaks

There have been many other small tweaks to improve the development experience that aren’t listed here. Click here to read the complete LightSpeed 2.1 change log.

What’s next?

We have plans for the next version of LightSpeed, including first class WCF support, stored procedure support and other, more secret, new features to help developers create better solutions faster. What is super helpful however is getting feedback on things you would like to see in the next version – they can be far out ideas or just little things that annoy you about building domain driven applications today. So, leave a comment, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Add your comments
Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 15 October 2008

5 Responses to “LightSpeed 2.1 Released!”

1. [...] The guys at Mindscape have announced LightSpeed 2.1 Released! [...]

   2008 October 16 - Links for today « My (almost) Daily Links Oct 16th, 2008

2. Awesome news JD, been waiting for official 2.1 to make a go of selling to mgmt. I love this product, keep up the good work!

   Eric Swann Oct 18th, 2008

3. Thanks for the comment Eric, as well as the blog post – much appreciated.

   Regarding Stored Procedures, give us a couple of days ;-)

   – JD

   John-Daniel Trask Oct 19th, 2008

4. [...] had a lot of requests for stored procedure support in LightSpeed, and now that 2.1 is out the door we’ve started to work on this functionality. So we’re pleased to announce that the [...]

   Mindscape Blog » Blog Archive » Stored procedures and LightSpeed Oct 20th, 2008

5. [...] announced the release of LightSpeed 2.1.  LightSpeed is a persistence layer tool that provides good integration with Visual [...]

   Visual Studio Links #79 : Visual Studio Hacks Oct 21st, 2008

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