Well, last nite I published the new version of Retina.NET at GotDotNet.

This new version includes a lot of hard work an several new cool features in addition to the usual bug fixes.
I have updated the QuickStart document to include a overview of the new lazy load capabilities for child entities and collections, but there are a lot of other improvements made that I will be describing in future articles as time goes.

The two most important new features are:

• The new Lazy load support using proxies.
• Inheritance support.

but there are also important changes in this areas:

• Criteria objects redone to support complex expressions and parsing (thanks Daniel Aguilera!)
• Criteria objects can include filter conditions from child entities.
• Generation and retrieving of Identity values in the storage.
• Support for Null child entities.
• Better support for NullableTypes.
• New Oracle8 DataStore, tested with Oracle 8i.
• The Oracle DataStore renamed to Oracle9, tested with Oracle 9i and 10g.
• The MsSql DataStore was tested with SQL 2005.
• Added more Unit Testing cases.
• A lot of clean-up in the code and accesibility of classes and members.
• Changed some Namespaces to better organize code.
• Updated ADO.NET providers used to the last version (MySql, Postgres, etc).
• A lot of other changes / fixes.

There are still a lot of work to do, but these are generally new features that I have in mind. This version then should be considered BETA quality and I expect that any remaining bug be eliminated so we can declare Retina.NET 1.0 final release soon, and then start working in the next version.

Please download the new bits/source and let me know how this new version is doing out there. Any comments are welcome.

Best regards,

Andrés.

2 Comments

• David Hayden said Tuesday, June 7, 2005 10:45:00 PM

  Andres,
  
  I had a chance to play with it the past couple of days and it is starting to grow on me :) How does one ask questions about the tool? Is there a forum? I only see a bug tracker on GDN but no way to just ask questions.
  
  I haven't had a chance to look at the source code yet, but is DataStoreBroker thread safe? I thought I would just make it a singleton.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Dave

• David Hayden said Wednesday, June 8, 2005 2:39:00 PM

  I don't know how I missed that message board on GDN???? I have to change my nickname. I never used GDN before and my nickname is something like "onedevguy."
  
  I just submitted 5 questions regarding best practices to the message board. They are mainly just questions regarding clarification on how I should set attributes.
  
  I created a quick CodeSmith template last night that creates the entity classes based on a table and I just want to make sure I am doing it correctly. The example in the documentation uses only public fields (no properties) and not a PK generated by the database table, so I had my work cut out for me the past couple of days figuring that out.
  
  Regards,
  
  Dave