Feature comparison?
Joined: 15-Jun-2005
Well, the 'what's new' section in the beta docs will tell you what's new. 
We only add features, so everything on that page is not available in 1.0.2005.1
Joined: 15-Jun-2004
Joined: 26-Feb-2006
I'll get back to you tomorrow (wednesday) with a proper list of highlights. .
Wade wrote:
Frans,
I downloaded the beta and I am still confused at what all the enhancements are. I looked over some of the documentation. Could you help with what are the new Designer Key Features and why we would want to upgrade besides just running on the .Net 2.0 framework? Thanks, Wade
First of all, I'd like to invite you to read the What's new page in the enclosed beta documentation. It gives a detailed overview what's new.
As that's very detailed, it can be confusing what the key features are. The core focus of V2.0 was to enhance the runtime libraries and templates to the next level, and to add those features to the designer which would make that possible. So the designer is of course enhanced with .NET 2.0 graphics, but the key aspect of the new designer is the new code generator configuration.
The template system is redesigned and it's now very easy to customize the code generation process without having to alter a lot of config files and read extensive sdk documentation.
Other key new feature is the ability to have a plugin open a window and have it docked inside the designer. This way you can simply start a plugin on an entity and open directly a custom designer if you want.
The runtime libraries/templates have as key new features:
- full .NET 2.0 support (generics, nullable types!, System.Transactions support etc.)
- ASP.NET 2.0 design time databinding and 2-way databinding in ASP.NET 2.0, fully declarative (no code required )
- entity views, which offer you in-memory sorting and filtering of entitycollections. They also offer you to create new sets of data from existing entity views, which are based on a filter. So you can for example load all customers in a collection, then create an entityview from that collection based on the filter (CustomerFields.Country=="France") (you can use normal predicates and sort expressions for this ) and you can THEN create a new set from those customer data which matched that filter, for example create a datatable with only the customerid and companyname. That's called 'projection'.
- support for database functions in expressions, so you can call any database function in an expression you set on a field.
- fetch data as a datareader. This means also fetching a stored procedure as a datareader
- create projections from resultsets in a datareader. This means you can now fetch entities based on a stored procedure call, or project data you fetch as a datareader onto whatever class structure you have, datatables, entities or custom classes. This is especially handy in webservice scenario's where you have dumb DTO classes (messages) and you can with the projections very easily project data from a resultset onto small classes you then send to the client, which is often more efficient than using the XML generation build in the entities, as the XmlSerializer is used in the DTO scenario, which generates code behind the scenes to do the serialization, hence the speed increase
- Better: SqlServer 2005 support: User defined types support, Synonym support for views/tables
- Oracle driver/DQE based on the MS Oracle provider (.NET 1.1/2.0)
- New validation framework, which makes it very easy to add validation code to the generated classes and intercept actions on the entities in a lot of stages and states.
- Debug visualizers for VS.NET 2005 to ease debugging of various LLBLGen Pro types.
- New template configuration system, which makes extending the code generation cycle very easy
- Much lower memory footprint of entities in memory
- Much faster query execution/efficiency
There are a lot of small details changed/improved. It's key to understand that you should take your time: you're not forced to upgrade, we keep on supporting 1.0.2005.1's codebase with bugfixes. No new features will be added to 1.0.2005.1's codebase, though if that's good enough for you, you can always decide to upgrade later on.
adrianporger wrote:
Hey Frans, thanks for your efforts so far!
But
I currently have some problems to understand all these new features mentioned in the help file..
- What is this feature about/ What can I do with it??
Powerful data-projection framework added: project any entitycollection or result set retrieved from a datareader onto any datastructure of any type using generic code.
Say you have a stored procedure which returns a set of data. You want to fill an entity collection with that data. You now can do that, by 'projecting' the resultset, onto entities. Please see the examples enclosed, it's pretty simple and straight forward.
Other example can be that you want to fill simple DTO classes with a subset of the fields in an entity. Simply project the subset of the fields onto the custom DTO classes with a few lines of code and llblgen pro will fill the dto classes for you.
- Do WEBSERVICES work now?
".NET 2.0: support for new wsdl schema interpretation logic to have wsdl.exe generate typed stubs instead of DataSet based stubs in Web services scenarios "
These templates are now included indeed. it's recommended to follow common practises though and that's contract-first webservices by sending messages, not object graphs.
- Will there be any GUI Generation Templates?
It's the plan to have gui generating templates when we release the final.
Well I am a developer too and I know it hurts customers questioning your work, I guess we all will see things more clear when the complete documentation with examples is finished!
No problem, do ask if you have a question .
Just give the beta a spin, I'm sure you'll like it.