Archive for the ‘Products’ Category

LightSpeed and LINQPad: the perfect partners

Tagged as LightSpeed, Products

LINQPad is a justly popular tool for trying out LINQ queries — it’s a great way to quickly check how a query will behave or just to check what’s in your database. (Actually, it’s a great way to test quick code snippets whether LINQy or otherwise.) LINQPad version 2 has just shipped, and in addition to the familiar LINQ to SQL support, it allows you to plug in other LINQ providers — such as LightSpeed.

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of a LightSpeed driver for LINQPad. This means you’ll be able to test LightSpeed queries using your LightSpeed domain model with all the speed and convenience of LINQPad.

And of course, because the driver uses LightSpeed, you’ll be able to use all the facilities of LightSpeed — for example, to perform Lucene-based full-text search from within LINQPad, or to include or exclude soft-deleted entities from the query.

To get the LightSpeed driver, just go into LINQPad, click Add Connection in the data sources list, choose View more drivers…, and choose the LightSpeed driver from the list. LINQPad will automatically download and install it. Once this is done, you’ll see LightSpeed in the Add Connection dialog. Select LightSpeed and click Next.

Now all you need to do is configure the connection with details of your database and the assembly containing your LightSpeed model. You’ll need to tell LINQPad the following details:

• What kind of database you’re talking to (SQLite, MySQL, SQL Server, etc.)
• The connection string for the database
• The assembly containing the LightSpeed model (your compiled EXE or DLL)
• The strong-typed unit of work class in that assembly (don’t forget the namespace!)

To save time, you can also use the Infer from Model button to extract this configuration information from your .lsmodel file. (You’ll still need to have built the DLL or EXE though.)

You can also set up LightSpeed context properties such as whether table names in the database are pluralised and whether to quote identifiers in queries. If you’re planning to use LINQPad to do ad hoc inserts and updates, you can also specify the identity method and timestamp strategy.

That’s it! You’re ready to get querying!

(If you have any trouble with the automatic download of the LightSpeed driver, you can instead download it directly from Mindscape here and install it using the Browse button on the “Choose a Driver” screen.)

You can get LINQPad here. And if you don’t already have LightSpeed, you can get the free Express edition here. And if there are any more features you’d like to see in the driver, let us know in the LightSpeed forum!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 1 March 2010

The dynamic duo: LightSpeed & Azure

Tagged as LightSpeed, Products

Recently there have been questions from LightSpeed users asking if LightSpeed works with Azure and the answer is YES!.

But wait a moment, what do we really mean when we talk about “Azure”? The brand has been used to describe a whole platform of cloud technologies from Microsoft so it is important to break down how LightSpeed works with each aspect. This is an important point to keep in mind when evaluating any product that claims to work with Azure by the way!

SQL Azure

SQL Azure is the database side of the fence. Many products can talk to SQL Azure quite happily because Microsoft made the smart move of using the SQL Server engine (with some modifications) rather than some hybrid new database type. This meant that we never had to actually make a change to LightSpeed to work with SQL Azure and because of that have been a bit slow to trumpet that LightSpeed worked happily with Azure.

Working against SQL Azure with LightSpeed really is just as simple as changing your connection string to point against your .database.windows.net host. Here is an example of running our LINQ unit tests for SQL Server against a local host:

and then against SQL Azure by changing the connection string:

The only difference is the latency involved, which reminds me not to run unit tests across the Internet again..

Windows Azure

Windows Azure can be thought of as where your application executes from – be it a website, a console application, whatever. This, interestingly enough, is the part where things can get a bit hairy for supporting the Azure platform. Windows Azure runs in two trust modes – Full Trust and Windows Azure Partial Trust (a cut down version of Medium Trust that you may have used before) and herein lies the only real challenge with supporting the Azure platform.

At the time of writing, the Microsoft documentation states that the default mode is Full Trust which is not actually correct. By default Azure will be setup to run in the Azure Partial Trust state and if you deploy a normal LightSpeed solution to it you’ll run into a problem. Now, you could set it to Full Trust, but that’s not ideal in all cases and we did some work a while back to ensure that LightSpeed happily supports Medium Trust environments.

If you wish to deploy into Windows Azure Partial Trust here’s a quick list of what to do:

1. Build your LightSpeedContext in code, do not use an app.config or web.config for the configuration.

2. Configure the LightSpeedContext to run in Partial Trust mode:

    LightSpeedContext.UseMediumTrustCompatibility = true;

3. All properties on your entities need to read/write. You can enable this in the designer using the following property (click somewhere on the background, not on an entity):

That’s it! You’re good to deploy to Windows Azure in Partial Trust, LightSpeed will chat happily with SQL Azure as if they were old friends and you can kick back with a brew :)

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Posted by Jeremy Boyd on 13 January 2010

Improved support options for customers

Tagged as LightSpeed, MegaPack, Products, SimpleDB Management Tools, VS File Explorer, WPF Diagramming, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

Hand in hand with our recent volume discounts and LightSpeed 3.0 release we have started to put in place an improved support capability for customers who need priority support options or may occasionally want to escalate support beyond what we normally offer.

Tooting our own horn a little, we have had very positive feedback from many customers who have said our support is fantastic. We hope this addition helps us maintain end user happiness as we continue to grow and our support load scales up.

What is priority support?

Priority support is the option to ensure that your request is dealt with promptly, and is reviewed before and prioritised over normal forum posts. It is also useful for folks who wish to not use the forum which is quite open and may not be viable for talking about sensitive parts of a software system.

Can I use it for feature requests?

No, we still urge that feature requests be posted in the forums so that others may discuss them (and because we don’t think it’s fair to charge you for suggesting cool features!). Features are still only added to products at our discretion.

How much does priority support cost?

We have priced support at $199 USD per priority support issue OR at $499 for a 5 pack of support issues, a 50% saving. You will be able to see if you have support tickets in your store account page. We have been issuing 1 priority support ticket per customer to LightSpeed 3.0 customers and upgrading Enterprise Edition customers. For other products, we’re in the process of migrating Enterprise customers to have a priority ticket added to their account.

The pricing is designed to be very cost effective and is inexpensive compared to the support options offered for other software (for example, one commercial NHibernate support vendor quotes 600 Euro, approximately $870 USD, per incident for ad hoc support).

You can purchase Priority support tickets in our online store.

Do I need it? Should I put all my requests through priority support?

If you need a guaranteed response, or a quick response is crucial to you, or you don’t want to discuss your issue on the public forum, then you should put a request through priority support. The forum will still get monitored actively by Mindscape staff and questions will be answered, but there are no guarantees around response times (our response times have usually been pretty good, but never guaranteed!).

Priority support is for those times when you need additional help and you don’t want to rely on the forums. You are welcome to simply buy a support ticket as you need them for $199 USD however it may be wiser to simply purchase a 5 pack in order to save 50%.

If I’ve missed any questions you have then please post a comment – I’m happy to answer them :-)

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 15 December 2009

LightSpeed 3.0 released!

Tagged as LightSpeed, News, Products

We’re proud to announce the release of LightSpeed 3.0, the latest version of our high-productivity, high-performance domain modelling framework and object-relational mapper, available for download today. LightSpeed 3 is packed with new features and we’ll be diving into them in more detail over the coming weeks, but here’s a quick overview of what’s new.

Querying enhancements

LightSpeed 3.0 offers a massively extended querying engine, with support for joins, grouping and subqueries. LINQ to LightSpeed makes it easy to take advantage of these new features, allowing you to write a whole range of queries that were previously impossible.

Migrations

LightSpeed 3.0 introduces a new migrations framework, enabling you to capture and customise your database change scripts. You can capture the changes you make to your model using the LightSpeed designer, customise them if required, and put them under version control so they can later be run in other environments such as your test or production servers. You can build migrations into your own program, generate SQL scripts for your DBA to run, or execute the migrations directly from within Visual Studio or the command line.

This should massively help improve developer effectiveness by doing away with the need to create SQL schema migration scripts manually. Helping developers deliver solutions faster and more reliably is at the very heart of what we are trying to deliver with LightSpeed 3.0.

Designer enhancements

For many users the designer is key to LightSpeed’s productivity, and we’ve made a whole load of improvements here to support your working methods and to make your life easier! There’s too many to list here, but among the key features are:

• Refactoring support: for example, you can do a solution-wide rename of an entity or property, just like you can in your Visual Studio code.
• XML documentation support for entities, properties, associations and stored procedures.
• Filtering the designer view to focus on a particular aggregate or subdomain.

To read about many of the existing LightSpeed designer capabilities, check out our LightSpeed Designer page. The designer is included with all versions of LightSpeed.

Improved legacy database support

Sometimes you’re working with an existing database or environment that doesn’t work with the LightSpeed conventions and where it’s just not practical to change things to accord with modern practices. Common issues are the use of composite keys and the requirement for all data access to go via stored procedures, and LightSpeed now supports both those scenarios.

Testability improvements

Mocks and fakes are important techniques for unit testing, enabling you to run tests quickly without having to reset or talk to a database. LightSpeed 3’s TestUnitOfWork and EntityFactory provide a simple way of defining and injecting test data into a LightSpeed-based solution.

Change tracking

Many users want to be able to track the changes that have been made to an item since it was loaded, for example for audit or logging purposes. LightSpeed 3 builds this facility into the core entity class so you can easily determine what fields have changed and what the original value was.

New database providers

The new SQL Server 2008 provider makes it easy to work with spatial data in a LightSpeed application, opening up all sorts of exciting possibilities for geographical information systems and spatial querying and visualisation.

We’ve also added support for IBM DB2 and for VistaDB 4.0.

New samples

We’ve added samples showing how to use LightSpeed in rich client and Web service environments, and beefed up our Web samples with a detailed and comprehensive example for the increasingly popular ASP.NET MVC framework.

New simplified licensing

We mentioned earlier today that we’ve simplified licensing for LightSpeed 3.0 into a per-developer model to avoid the confusion of our existing pricing model. We have also incorporated volume discounts into the online store to ensure that LightSpeed 3.0 is one of the most cost effective solutions to improving developer productivity you will find!

LightSpeed 3 is a huge release and we’ll have a lot more to say about it in future posts. For the time being, download the free Express edition and give it a try!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 14 December 2009

LightSpeed 3 licensing changes

Tagged as LightSpeed, News, Products

Ever since version 1, LightSpeed has used a rather specialised “We Make Kittens Cry” licensing regime, based on licensing not per seat or per site, but on per intellectual property owner. A lot of customers found this rather confusing, so for LightSpeed 3 we’re changing to a more conventional per-developer policy.

If you’re an existing customer, what does this mean for you?

First, if you purchased LightSpeed within the last 12 months, you get a free upgrade for all your current developers. You’ll need to let us know how many seats you have. You can do this from your account page and you’ll have LightSpeed 3.0 immediately!

Second, if you purchased LightSpeed more than 12 months ago, you’ll get a heavily discounted upgrade for all your current developers. You can do this from your account page and obtain LightSpeed 3.0 immediately after payment.

Since pricing is per developer, you do not need to buy an additional licence for your build server. We’ve found continuous integration to be a huge asset in terms of maintaining and delivering products, and we don’t want to put any obstacles in the way of your using LightSpeed in a continuous integration environment!

Another change in LightSpeed 3 is that there is no more Standard or Enterprise Edition. There’s only the free Express edition, and the unlimited Professional edition. Source code is available with the Professional edition, but it’s a one-off purchase, not per-seat ($499 USD). Existing Standard customers will be upgraded to Professional. Existing Enterprise customers will receive a source code licence along with their new seats.

So make a kitten happy. Upgrade to LightSpeed 3 today.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 14 December 2009