The long awaited beta of LLBLGen Pro v3.0 is here! This version has a completely new designer, offering (among many other features) model-first development, fine grained entity and target schema management / mapping.

Support for NHibernate, Linq to Sql and Entity Framework will be added in the coming weeks. Customers with a v2.x license can download the beta in the customer area, under v2.6, section 'betas'. This betas section contains several files, none of the files contains one of the others, so if you need all of them, you have to download all of them.

To run the v3.0 beta, you'll need a valid v3.0 beta license, which you can obtain in the customer area, please see the download item (expand it).

As there's so much to explain what's new, I won't do that here but refer to the beta documentation pdf file included in the beta zip. To provide feedback, please use the v3.0 beta forums in the v3.0 beta section on our forums section.

Thanks for your patience and moral support during this long period and hopefully v3.0 is what you all were looking for and hoping for. For the people who might look for a feature we didn't include: v3.0 isn't the end of the road, there will be more v3.x versions in the future

Changes which will be made during the beta - NHibernate, EF, Linq to Sql support - Fix/addition of about 60 open change requests / open bugs in llblgen pro runtime library

Looking great, Frans! We can't wait to check it out!

Ryan

Great... will check it out NOW!

Look under the beta section of the version 2.6 downloads.

Otis wrote:

Changes which will be made during the beta - NHibernate, EF, Linq to Sql support

Hi,

According to it's feature set, version 3 will "support NHibernate".

I've looked everywhere around the site and cannot find any more information on what exactly this new feature will be. Can you please point me to the right place, or explain to me what this feature will be?

Thank you

Rob.

SonicMonkey wrote:

Otis wrote:

Changes which will be made during the beta - NHibernate, EF, Linq to Sql support

Hi,

According to it's feature set, version 3 will "support NHibernate".

I've looked everywhere around the site and cannot find any more information on what exactly this new feature will be. Can you please point me to the right place, or explain to me what this feature will be?

Thank you

Rob.

You can create a project with entities from a database or from scratch (and then create the db from that) like you can do for llblgen pro's own framework, and you can then generate .net classes and hbm.xml mapping files, using settings to tweak the output. So instead of using our own framework you can choose to use another framework yet still use our designer.

Otis wrote:

You can create a project with entities from a database or from scratch (and then create the db from that) like you can do for llblgen pro's own framework, and you can then generate .net classes and hbm.xml mapping files, using settings to tweak the output. So instead of using our own framework you can choose to use another framework yet still use our designer.

Is it a simple configuration setting? Can I generate llblgen framework code, flip a switch and then generate nhibernate code?

I am currently looking at using either framework. From what I hear nhibernate doesn't have much in terms of visual designers. Do you see your designers working well even if using the nhibernate framework?

Cheers

Rob

SonicMonkey wrote:

Otis wrote:

You can create a project with entities from a database or from scratch (and then create the db from that) like you can do for llblgen pro's own framework, and you can then generate .net classes and hbm.xml mapping files, using settings to tweak the output. So instead of using our own framework you can choose to use another framework yet still use our designer.

Is it a simple configuration setting? Can I generate llblgen framework code, flip a switch and then generate nhibernate code?

Yes.

I am currently looking at using either framework. From what I hear nhibernate doesn't have much in terms of visual designers. Do you see your designers working well even if using the nhibernate framework?

V3.x is the first designer which is targeted to support multiple O/R mapper frameworks and we planned to expand that to support as much O/R mapper frameworks as possible. We won't abandon our own framework but the designer can now be used for other frameworks as well so people have more options to choose from and still use our designer as the tool to create the models, generate mapping files, update databases etc. .

So yes, it should work well with nhibernate and other frameworks (nhibernate and EF templates are currently in development) as our core design was targeted towards that purpose: the designer has to be the best designer possible for these O/R mapper frameworks.

That sounds pretty awesome!

Obviously the change between frameworks (say nhibernate to llblgen or vice versa) is possible when using the llblgen visual designers as the starting point.

How about importing an nhibernate project so that it can be migrated to llblgen? :-)

Rob

SonicMonkey wrote:

That sounds pretty awesome!

Obviously the change between frameworks (say nhibernate to llblgen or vice versa) is possible when using the llblgen visual designers as the starting point.

How about importing an nhibernate project so that it can be migrated to llblgen? :-) Rob

We did plan it but it's pretty complex to do (as in: how to deal with all the different aspects possible in an existing nhibernate project). We have a v2.6 (llblgen pro) -> v3 conversion template so one can start with an existing llblgen pro project. We hope to have some time to implement an import system before RTM which can then be used to import nhibernate and other meta-data. NHibernate does have a way to obtain meta-data stored inside an existing session, so we'll look into that, but it's likely we'll release it after RTM as a plugin. (same is true for linq to sql and entity framework).

Switching frameworks has an effect on framework specific settings for the entities / fields in the model of course, not all frameworks support the same features / settings.

Is it just the NHibernate mapping files that will be generated? There isn't anything else that can be generated for NHibernate?

Will your business classes be generated?

Thanks

Rob

SonicMonkey wrote:

Is it just the NHibernate mapping files that will be generated? There isn't anything else that can be generated for NHibernate?

Will your business classes be generated?

Thanks

Rob

There will be different presets: just hbm.xml files (as some people want that) and also with classes.

When is the estimated release date for 3.0? Thank you!

edthebutler wrote:

When is the estimated release date for 3.0? Thank you!

In may 2010. We aimed for april but the additional frameworks took a little longer. So it's going to be may 2010.

And now may is here Any news on the release date for 3.0?

with regards Helene

Helene wrote:

And now may is here Any news on the release date for 3.0?

with regards Helene

before the end of may, that's all I can give you at this point

The beta license expires in 4 days. Will there be an extended beta license or will the release version be available for purchase before then?

jayrdub wrote:

The beta license expires in 4 days. Will there be an extended beta license or will the release version be available for purchase before then?

We hope to release friday or saturday, so we'll make it . If we have to postpone it to next week, we'll release an intermediate build which will extend the beta period, so no worries.

the RC has been posted 5 minutes ago.