5 June 2008 in Code, Mindscape | Comments enabled

I’m super pleased that we’ve just shipped LightSpeed 2.0! This release has been a huge amount of work and I think that shows in how polished and feature full the final release is.

Key new features:

LINQ Provider – Developers can now query using LINQ but still leverage the fantastic performance of the LightSpeed querying framework. This means that with LightSpeed you effectively get LINQ to MySQL, LINQ to PostgreSQL, LINQ to Oracle, LINQ to SQLite and LINQ to SQL Server. We of course included extensions to ensure you could still use our great querying functionality not directly made available through the standard LINQ interface (named aggregates, eager loading etc).

Model Designer – If you’re using Visual Studio 2008 you can install the LightSpeed Designer. This fantastic addition means you can now design your models – everything from entities and relationships down to specific caching and validation concerns on your properties. This is a huge step forward in enabling end users to get up and running quickly with a LightSpeed powered domain model.

What is particularly kick-ass about this designer is that it supports basic database round tripping. What does that mean? When you drag on a table from the server explorer (if you’re a data centric type of person) and then you later update the database, you can see those changes made to your model without needing to delete them and drag the tables back on. This is fantastic for those people with larger models.

We decided we could take this one step further and introduced some initial rapid database prototyping functionality which means you can make changes in the designer and push those changes down to the database. This is great for rapidly getting up and running.

There is plenty more to come in this space and I look forward to seeing it evolve.

Multi-context support – Earlier versions of LightSpeed were great when you needed to work with one database but things got a wee bit hairy if you needed to access different databases from one application instance. This problem is now solved as we allow multiple contexts within a single application so you can be talking to, for example, Oracle for your store data, SQLite for your configuration data.

These are, in my view, the top three cool new features in LightSpeed 2. There are, of course, heaps of other features that we’ve packed in to help developers work faster and more effectively.

For more information please visit:

The Mindscape Blog
The LightSpeed page
Download the free Express edition of LightSpeed

Happy coding!

John-Daniel