Currently considering migrating this venerable LLBLGen 2.x project providing the data layer of a vintage ASP.NET application for .NET Framework 3.5 and MySql 5.0, to something more... up-to-date. I remember how happy you used to be with the various MySql drivers back in the time Now I need to catch up with the current situation.

IIC, the MySql.Data.dll driver is simply not supported anymore, and the only supported driver is Devart.Data.dll, which is free in the Express edition. Correct?

That would take us up to .NET Framework 4.8 only, as the free Express edition does not seem to support .NET Core / 5.0+.

I assume that if MySql.Data.dll support was removed, it's because of technical reasons, and it would be pointless to try to use it one way or another. Otherwise, you would have done it already. Correct?

Anything else I need to know about MySql support? This all looks like FAQs but I could not find answers, so I'm asking

sgay wrote:

Currently considering migrating this venerable LLBLGen 2.x project providing the data layer of a vintage ASP.NET application for .NET Framework 3.5 and MySql 5.0, to something more... up-to-date. I remember how happy you used to be with the various MySql drivers back in the time Now I need to catch up with the current situation.

IIC, the MySql.Data.dll driver is simply not supported anymore, and the only supported driver is Devart.Data.dll, which is free in the Express edition. Correct?

We used the CoreLab MySQL provider in v2.x and CoreLab was bought by (or changed their name to) DevArt, so DevArt.Data is really its successor. So yes the old one won't work. Technically we did leave the factory name in the code so it will likely start, but it lacks types supported by later mysql versions and overall we don't test with it so I wouldn't use it.

We never supported the ADO.NET provider from MySQL itself because it's GPL licensed and actually pretty terrible in quality.

That would take us up to .NET Framework 4.8 only, as the free Express edition does not seem to support .NET Core / 5.0+.

I assume that if MySql.Data.dll support was removed, it's because of technical reasons, and it would be pointless to try to use it one way or another. Otherwise, you would have done it already. Correct?

DevArt's provider is the successor of the one we supported earlier, as said above, so it was the natural thing to do to support it. Also because the official one is inferior and GPL licensed. The DevArt one isn't free on .net core, correct, tho it's also not very expensive.

Anything else I need to know about MySql support? This all looks like FAQs but I could not find answers, so I'm asking

No, that's pretty much it (also see https://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.8/Designer/Databases/mysql.htm and https://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.8/LLBLGen%20Pro%20RTF/Using%20the%20generated%20code/FeaturesPerDB/MySQL.htm) I'd use mysql 8.

We are aware there is another OSS MySql provider available, but we haven't added support for that one yet as it lacks schema features we need for meta data retrieval. Maybe in the future.

Ah yes, Corelab, that was the name. Funny enough, this project seems to run on the GPL thingy, I would need to dig into the code to figure out how we did it. Anyways, we're going to go with the DevArt one, and yes the pro version is not that expensive.

Thanks for the answer!

Oh and I never used the more recent versions of the designer... the latest 5.x certainly makes a big diff vs 2.6 Liking it a lot.

Thanks