Initial Visual Studio Design time support added to master branch!

Achievement unlocked!

With the merge of Pull Request #213 (PR #213), Kenji Uno added support for Visual Studio Design Time also known as DDEX. 

A most wanted feature

From the statistics of pageviews I get from a previous post about design time support, I can affirm that this is a most wanted feature of Npgsql. And I'm very glad to say that Npgsql is finally having it. I'd like to thank Kenji Uno for all his hard work to make this happen. 

Npgsql DDEX support is done through an extension file which can be easily installed in Visual Studio. This is a much better situation than we had before where it was needed to use an experimental instance of Visual Studio. 

History

The code started with wwindcloud in PR #67 and Kenji started to play with it and said he was working to get it usable in VS2012 and 2013. 

Some time later, Kenji said he had some success to get Npgsql DDEX initially working and started to fix the bugs he was finding. 

In order to be able to add more fixes to the code, Kenji started the PR 213 and started to add more features and fixes until now when we merged all the changes back to master branch.

How to use it

Kenji Uno wrote a tutorial about how to build and use this feature. Below are some screenshots from the tutorial.

Please, give it a try and let us know if it works for you. Remember that this is a work in progress, so you may face bugs and problems. 

I'd like to thank Kenji Uno for all his hard work to get this feature working. And also thank wwindcloud for the initial work.

Sample screenshots

Here is an screenshot when you double click the .vsix file to install the extension:

When you install it, you will be able to select it when creating a new data source connection:

Npgsql 2.1.3 released!

This version restores the @@ operator support removed in the previous version. Thanks Glen Parker who provided a fix.

Downloads can be found at the usual locations:

github download page
and
the nuget repository.

Pgfoundry will be updated soon.

Npgsql 2.1.2 released!

Npgsql 2.1.2 is out!

This is a bug fix release. Two fixes are present:

• KeyNotFoundException when setting ApplicationName on NpgsqlConnectionStringBuilder and 
• A regression when using NHibernate with queries containing '<' operator. (Less Than' prepare failing). Unfortunately, this fix breaks previous support for @@ operators. So if you need this support, you will have to use the previous 2.1.1 version. Glen Parker is working in a permanent fix. Sorry for this big inconvenience. More info about that can be found at the link above.

Please, give it a try and let me know if you have any problems. Please, report your issues in our github issues page.

Npgsql 2.1.0 released!

After a long time, Npgsql 2.1.0 is finally released! 

If you have been following my posts about Npgsql 2.1 beta and rc releases, you know we did a lot of changes since our last stable release.

The change log for this version is big. You can find a complete list of what has changed and the bugs fixed in the github project release page. It has a lot of information about the changes we made since our last stable 2.0.14 release. You should check it out to see what changed and what new features you will get when you use 2.1.

Developers using Npgsql 2.1 and Entity Framework should pay attention to the changes related to new configuration settings. More information about those changes can be checked here.

Downloads are available on Nuget, github. pgfoundry downloads will be made available soon.

Finally, I'd like to thank some people who did an incredible job and that without them this release wouldn't be possible!

Glen Parker has been working in the optimizations tasks since his first git commit. From the changelog you can see his tireless work regarding each part of Npgsql which could be optimized. Thank you very much for your contributions, Glen!

Shay Rojansky has been helping as the mastermind of the project restructuring support. He contributed a lot of changes which made our lives working with Npgsql much better. Thanks to him we can compile Npgsql for different .net platform versions easily. He also got TeamCity build server working as well as github integration. He helped us to get EntityFramework pre-6 and pos-6 verions easily integrated.
Thank you, Shay!

And Dave Page who helped us with the server where the TeamCity is installed. Without his help, I'm sure our TeamCity installation would be much more difficult. Thank you, Dave!

Please, give it a try and let us know what you think. Drop by Npgsql user forums to discuss and comment or send your bug reports to our issues section on github. 

Npgsql 2.1 Release Candidate 1 released!

Today we released Npgsql 2.1 RC1. This release has very few fixes since Beta1. In fact, only two:

Fixed bugs:

#141 AlwaysPrepare does not works in some cases. Thanks @avb1987.

#153 Fixed wrong comma putting in AddFunctionColumnListSupport(). Thanks @tyler-nguyen.

The changelog of the Beta1 is way bigger and has a lot of information about the changes we made since our last stable 2.0.14 release. You should check it out to see what changed and what new features you will get when you use 2.1.

We will have the final version release in the beginning of March.

Downloads are available on Nuget, github and pgfoundry. You may want to check my previous post about how to get Npgsql 2.1 beta1. The instructions there also apply to 2.1 rc1.

Please, give it a try and let us know what you think. Drop by our user forums to discuss or send your bug reports to our issues section on github.