With the release of the Entity Framework 4.1 I was interested to see how well the code first aspect works with multiple database vendors.  Could you use the code first modeling to change the database through a connection string?  I thought it might be worth a quick sample app to find out.

Download the sample Project

About the sample databases

I have an identical database in both SQL CE 4 and VistaDB 4.1.  Since they both have ADO.Net providers for the Entity Framework I decided to use them for this test.  The databases must have identical schema for this to work, otherwise your code wouldn’t match the database.  The data in the databases is slightly different, this is from an RSS Reader app.

The schema is fairly simple, only two tables.  RssFeeds (list of feeds the user wants to get entries from), and RssEntries (the actual RSS entries from the feed).  The schema is simple enough to be used for demo, but has real world data that always makes a demo much nicer.

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VistaDB, an Embedded SQL Database Engine Used By Thousands of .NET Developers Worldwide, Has Been Acquired By Esymmetrix, Developer of Gibraltar Software, a Suite of Products for Application Monitoring and Customer Support. – Read full press release

Welcome the new team

Please welcome Gibraltar Software as the new team that will drive VistaDB forward.  Kendall and the entire Gibraltar team know the product very well, they use it in their own products.  Very similar to how I took over VistaDB originally, they are now taking it on and continuing to develop the engine.  And most of the VistaDB customers know Gibraltar because that was how the CEIP program was implemented in VistaDB.

Gibraltar Software has officially acquired the VistaDB product line.  Read the full blog post about acquiring VistaDB on Gibraltar Software.  And look at the News and Events page.

Passing the torch

Since closing the VistaDB Software offices in Florida I have relocated to the Seattle area, and moved on to full time employment.  I officially resigned as the President of VistaDB Software, Inc in August.  The team that is running the Corporation has officially resolved to allow Gibraltar Software to acquire all the assets of the VistaDB product line.

Good match

I really feel this is a good match for both the Gibraltar team, and the VistaDB product.  Kendall and his team already have a very deep technical understanding of the product, it’s strengths and weaknesses.  And the product is already deeply embedded in their flagship product, so they have a vested interest in driving the technology forward.

Give them some time, be patient

The Gibraltar team is going to take some time to form a new strategy for the product.  Give them some breathing room to make those hard decisions, and be supportive of their bold move.  It takes a lot of guts to pickup thousands of developers as a small organization.  I know it will be hard, but let them think things through and announce them on their timeframe.  I expect to see good things from them in the coming months.

Links

Official Press Release about Acquisition

Gibraltar Page About Acquiring VistaDB

Yes, Visual Studio 2010 was released today to much fanfare in Las Vegas. 

We of course had to immediately download it (along with what must be some major percentage of MSDN subscribers) and give it a test. 

Use Build 14 or higher

VistaDB 4.0 Build 14 works great with the VS 2010 Release.  Versions prior to this should probably not be used as there were some changes we had to make in order to get everything to work with VS 2010 in the first place. 

I have run through all of our NUnit tests in both .Net 2 and .Net 4 and all of them work correctly.  The Visual Studio plugins work, and the Entity Framework provider seems to be working fine as well.  The screen shot above is me generating a .Net 4 EF model on our Tickets Database.  (Note you can use the Include Foreign Key Columns only if you are using .Net 4)

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Visual Studio 2010 RC came out a few weeks ago, and the current VistaDB 4 build 12 does not work.  Build 12 obviously came out before the RC, so it was never tested on that release.

Updating for 2010 RC

The next VistaDB 4.0 build will be updated for Visual Studio 2010 RC.  I was actually of two minds of this issue. If the final (really final) build is only a few weeks away maybe we should just wait for that build.  Microsoft has broken ADO.Net plugins, EF, and several other things we need in EVERY new build of Visual Studio 2010.

Beta 2 left a bad taste

When 2010 Beta 2 shipped we scrambled really hard to get an updated build that worked.  We literally dropped everything else to just focus on those issues for about a week.  My thinking at the time was that if we found errors and got the bugs in quickly to Microsoft they would be fixed for the final release.  We opened 10 tickets with Microsoft on Beta 2 – ALL of them were denied as “too late in cycle to be fixed”.

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