Archive for the ‘Products’ Category

Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010 released!

Tagged as Products, SharePoint

We’ve gone all enterprisy with our latest release – Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010. In fact, we’re so enterprisy that this is our slowest release to date – we actually finished developing this product several months ago and gave it out to a bunch of users to work with. Nothing like being slow to feel enterprise ready!

Jokes aside, we’re pleased to get this release out and into the hands of our users. Like all our products, there’s a free version that you can grab and start playing with right away.

So what does Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010 actually do?

It helps developers who want to work with LINQ-to-SharePoint, a new feature in SharePoint 2010. Unfortunately, if you’re wanting to do that then you need to work with some awkward command line tools to build up a model. Thankfully, visual modelling is something we have a bunch of experience with so we thought we could give developers a better way to work with LINQ-to-SharePoint models. It will save developers a heap of time when working with LINQ-to-SharePoint by generating LINQ classes and data contexts for SharePoint lists. If you don’t work with SharePoint 2010, or have any interest in LINQ-to-SharePoint then this product isn’t for you sorry!

There’s also the ability to nicely synchronize your model from your SharePoint store if you’re making rapid changes to your SharePoint list structure:

It’s also our first product that has any connection to the insanely successful SharePoint product. We’re looking forward to hearing what sorts of interaction you would like to have with SharePoint from within Visual Studio so that we can roll out new features into this product (hence we didn’t limit the name to only talking about LINQ-to-SharePoint).

Pricing and trial

We’re retailing Visual Tools for SharePoint at $349 USD which includes 12 months of updates like all Mindscape purchases. Click here to visit the store. Trial editions can be downloaded from here.

We’d love to get your feedback and, as mentioned, if there’s anything else you’d like us to do with SharePoint let us know either in the comments or in our forums.

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 18 August 2010

New NHibernate Designer features available

Tagged as NHibernate Designer, Products

Thanks for the feedback Frans! We love feedback here at Mindscape – it’s what makes our products better. Once we know that people want a feature or have found a bug we like to work damn fast at fixing it. That’s why we ship nightly builds of all our products – it means all customers, even trial users, can get the latest and greatest builds whenever they want.

Not wanting to be reported to the cyber police, I’m excited to announce that 13 hours after the feedback all users can download an update that includes:

• Rename entity refactoring
• Rename property refactoring
• Partial class creation refactoring
• Convert to manual implementation refactoring
• Extract interface refactoring
• Support for cross-cutting foreign keys like in Northwind (sorry Northwind customers)
• 72.4% more advanced than the 1.0 version

We’ve been lucky to get lots of useful feedback from folks other than Frans, and we’re starting to build this in too. So in this release, you’ll also find we’ve added super sparkle keyboard support to the NHibernate Designer too, so it’s a snap to quickly add a bunch of properties without taking your hands away from the keyboard.

The latest build is available here or from the Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager. Simply uninstall the existing version and install this copy – it’s the same for customers and trial users since it’s a unified install. If you originally installed it through Extension Manager it’s even easier — just go to the Updates tab, wait for VS to find us, and click Update.

Thanks again to all our users who have given feedback about the NHibernate Designer, we really appreciate it :-)

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 12 August 2010

Announcing the Mindscape NHibernate Designer

Tagged as NHibernate Designer, Products

We hate to admit it, but there are some people out there who don’t use LightSpeed. Whether through policy or preference, they’ve instead chosen a free object-relational mapper. And by far the most popular choices are Microsoft’s Entity Framework and the open-source NHibernate.

NHibernate is an impressively flexible and extensible ORM. It’s often said that you can get NHibernate to do pretty much anything. But for many users NHibernate is a bit daunting. It can require quite a lot of work just to set up mappings, let alone get everything working just the way you want it. It’s easy for new NHibernate users to get lost in a sea of options. Fluent NHibernate and mapping attributes have improved this a bit, but it can still be a bit intimidating.

So we’re pleased to announce the Mindscape NHibernate Designer, a visual design and configuration tool for NHibernate models.

The NHibernate Designer brings our extensive experience from LightSpeed to NHibernate users. It integrates seamlessly into Visual Studio 2010, and not only presents a convenient visual way of creating and understanding models, but also helps with your workflow by checking for possible mistakes, providing helper code and supporting rapid iteration of the database schema.

The NHibernate Designer supports a wide variety of core NHibernate features. You can use the standard primitive data types plus the YesNo and TrueFalse special data types, and you can also import your own enum types and IUserType user-mapped data types. We support set, bag, list and map collection types, and one-to-many, one-to-one and one-to-many associations. Identity generation can be configured globally and on a per-property basis, with a variety of generators supported including identity column, GUID, hi-lo and sequence. The designer provides control over code generation so that you can provide your own property implementations where required, and also offers escape hatches for when the designer can’t quite handle your mappings.

Rapid development

The NHibernate Designer supports both model-first and database-first development. If you already have a SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite or PostgreSQL database, you can drag tables onto the designer from Server Explorer, and the designer will render them as entities, set up their properties and work out their associations. Alternatively, you can create entities, properties and associations yourself using the Toolbox.

What’s more, as you make changes you can have the NHibernate designer keep the model and database in sync. For example, if you’re managing your database schema through your database tools, you can choose Update Model from Database, and the NHibernate designer will figure out what changes need to be applied to your model, without discarding any edits you’ve made by hand. Conversely, if you realise that, say, you need a new property, you can add it in the designer, choose Update Database from Model and the designer will make the necessary database changes, such as adding a column, for you. This enables a very rapid, iterative way of developing your model using the tools you’re most comfortable with.

What does this mean for LightSpeed?

Nothing, really. The NHibernate Designer is aimed at users who have chosen, for whatever reason, not to use LightSpeed. We still think LightSpeed is the better choice for the majority of projects, but we recognise that it’s not always an option. We’re continuing to develop LightSpeed aggressively and we’ll continue to recommend it over alternatives. If you haven’t tried LightSpeed then you can learn more and experience the blissful joy of using it here.

Does it implement (insert NHibernate feature here)?

Like we said, the sheer range of options in NHibernate can be pretty daunting. This first release of the NHibernate Designer aims to support the 80% case, rather than to offer absolutely every feature and extension point that NHibernate provides. If there’s a particular feature that’s key for you, download the free trial and have a look, or let us know in the forums.

That said, the designer does provide escape hatches, so that you can tweak mappings that don’t quite meet your needs, and integrate manually coded and mapped entities with designer-based ones. So even if we don’t yet support a particular feature, you may still be able to use the designer for other parts of your project.

Where can I get it?

You can download a free 14-day trial of the NHibernate designer from the Mindscape Web site, or you can install it directly through the Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager (go to Online Gallery and search for “Mindscape NHibernate Designer” or visit the gallery page here).

The full version retails for $249 USD

Happy coding!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 10 August 2010

WPF Elements 3.0 is here!

Tagged as News, Products, WPF Elements

We’re pleased to announce the release of WPF Elements 3.0, our suite of controls for Windows Presentation Foundation. 26 stunning controls, 5 beautiful themes, limitless possibilities!

What? The official marketing slogan’s not enough? You want to know more?

What’s new in WPF Elements 3?

The best way to get a feel for what’s in WPF Elements is to check out the online demo. This allows you to play with all of the controls and to see the different themes. Here’s a quick list of the new controls:

• Scheduler: an Outlook-style calendar that you can use to display any kind of time-based data — meetings, tasks, events, reminders, whatever!
• OutlookBar: a convenient, compact and attractive way of presenting multiple tabs in an application
• PaletteColorPicker: a color picker which encourages your users to select colors that work well together
• DualProgressBar: for when you need to provide more detailed feedback than a simple progress bar allows
• DualSlider: a simple and visual control for specifying ranges such as minimum-maximum options
• SplitButton: a familiar and intuitive way of presenting a family of commands
• RichTextToolBar: because with all those formatting options in the RichTextBox, your users are going to want some way of getting at them
• TimePicker and TimeSpanPicker: quick ways to select a time of day and duration for a time-based item such as a meeting or reminder

WPF Elements 3 also incorporates the WPF Property Grid and WPF Themes which were previously available as separate products. Plus of course it includes all the classic WPF Elements controls including:

• Tree list view (multicolumn tree view)
• Auto complete box
• Numeric and currency text boxes
• Prompt text box overlay
• Spin controls
• Coverflow
• Color picker
• Calendar and date picker controls
• Masked text box

Where can I get it?

WPF Elements 3 is available from the store now. It’s a free upgrade for existing WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid or WPF Themes customers.

Or download the 14-day trial FREE!

Check it out today!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 4 August 2010

WPF Elements 3.0 beta

Tagged as News, Products, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

We’re pleased to announce that a beta build of WPF Elements 3.0 is now available to existing WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid and WPF Themes customers.

WPF Elements is our suite of controls for Windows Presentation Foundation and in 3.0 we’re not only bundling in the popular Property Grid control and our stylish WPF themes, we’re also adding a whole load of new controls:

• Scheduler – Outlook-style calendar display
• DualProgressBar – display operation and sub-operation progress
• DualSlider – a handy and visual way for users to select a range
• OutlookBar – an attractive and compact tab control
• PaletteColorPicker – help your users select colors that work well together
• SplitButton – it’s a button! It’s a menu! No, it’s a benu! Or possibly a menton
• TimePicker – for selecting a time of day
• TimeSpanPicker – for selecting a duration
• RichTextToolBar – a convenient and familiar UI for formatting the WPF RichTextBox

The PropertyGrid control has also been enhanced with new themes, and WPF Themes extends these to the built-in WPF controls.

The WPF Elements 3.0 beta is in the store now and is free to current WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid and WPF Themes customers. Take it for a spin and if you run into any issues, let us know!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 26 July 2010