VistaDB 4 and Visual Studio 2010

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)

Visual Studio 2010 Next Steps

We do have a few items on our feature list additions for Visual Studio 2010.  Some are new items from changes in Visual Studio itself, others are just new features.

If you are upgrading from an RC to the current VS 2010 build remember to reinstall VistaDB afterwards.  The Visual Studio 2010 installer will wipe the directory entries we put there to load our provider.

Entity Framework 4

We know about the model first provision in EF 4.  We don’t current support that model.  The changes to allow third party T4 templates were a surprise to us (they were not allowed in the early betas).  You cannot currently target a VistaDB database from a model to generate it.  This requires some sort of T4 template from us to tell the model how to map the EDM models to our structures.  I don’t anticipate this being too complicated (famous last words). 

There are some other changes in the EF provider model for .Net 4 that we can’t implement unless we build a special EF assembly for .Net 4.  I am more reluctant to do this one right now as it would complicate end user deployment scenarios, and could end up with confusion in the UI (which VistaDB 4 EF provider did you want?).  We will have to do some research to see if we can make a hybrid assembly to support the new features or not.

Server Explorer

The Server Explorer in VS 2010 has some new abilities that we are not taking advantage of right now.  But in order to do so we would have to build two different plugins for Visual Studio.  One for VS 2008, and a separate one for VS 2010.

There are some compelling reasons for us to build a new plug-in.  We want to unify our interface between the Data Builder and the Visual Studio plug-in.  But this would be a large chunk of work that really doesn’t “add” anything to the product.  It just gives a new UI on the DDEX provider.

Templates

You can add a VistaDB Database to projects in VS 2010.  But the Visual Basic template causes an error (even though it adds the database).  We are going to have to look into that.

Any Silverlight project also incorrectly reports that you can add a VistaDB database, but the engine won’t work in Silverlight. 

I also want to add a new template to add a VistaDB License to a project and avoid the whole licenses.licx addition step for users.  I think it would simplify things quite a bit.

VSIX Packages

We have already begun to use the newer VSIX package format for VistaDB 4 (starting in Build 14) for some things (templates right now).  We would like to investigate this further as it greatly simplifies the deployment and setup of the engine.

What about you?

Have your downloaded VS 2010?  Planning to migrate all your projects quickly, or over time?  I read that Code Project is converting their entire site to .Net 4 in the next few weeks. 

I think it will be very interesting to see how quickly companies start to adopt VS 2010 for their primary IDE.  Since it can target .Net 2 or higher I don’t really see a reason not to adopt the IDE.  But I wonder how many people will start to set their output targets to .Net 4.  That will be a very interesting adoption curve indeed.