I bought the product about two month's ago to create a new web site using .NET 2.0 however the lack of design time databinding has left me with a great OR/mapper with no way to use it. See my clients need to employ the use of graphic user interface designers to create the front-end of the site and without design time databinding i am unable to implement LLBLGen in my project at all as of now. If I understand correctly as of now there is no way to implement design time databinding with LLBLGen Entities and although databinding via code is possible it means that someone who understands the Entities is required to build (or help build) the UI.

Some questions about V2:

1) When will I be able to buy it? First, I heard "this month" at the beginning of April, then "next week" on the third week of May... an exact date would be wonderful.

2) Will V2 implement generic's as opposed to the current use of collections? As I understand it generics can help speed things up signifigantly.

-Kas

KastroNYC wrote:

I bought the product about two month's ago to create a new web site using .NET 2.0 however the lack of design time databinding has left me with a great OR/mapper with no way to use it. See my clients need to employ the use of graphic user interface designers to create the front-end of the site and without design time databinding i am unable to implement LLBLGen in my project at all as of now. If I understand correctly as of now there is no way to implement design time databinding with LLBLGen Entities and although databinding via code is possible it means that someone who understands the Entities is required to build (or help build) the UI.

Some questions about V2:

1) When will I be able to buy it? First, I heard "this month" at the beginning of April, then "next week" on the third week of May... an exact date would be wonderful.

Well, we had a list of 'must have' and 'nice to have' features. The list of 'must have' took longer than anticipated. We're almost done, it's likely going beta this week. You'll then be able to test it out, and if you want to proceed, buy the upgrade. Design time databinding is currently (in 1.0.2005.1) not working in ASP.NET 2.0, it is in winforms.

2) Will V2 implement generic's as opposed to the current use of collections? As I understand it generics can help speed things up signifigantly.

Yes. V2 will come in 2 codebases: one for .net 1.x and one for .net 2.0. The one for .net 2.0 is been ported to .NET in every detail so also internally generics are used as well as gives you generic collections, where appropriate. As we're already on the market for 3 years, we had to take backwards compatibility into account. Selfservicing already has typed collections, and we kept those. Adapter got a new EntityCollection<T>, which gives you a typed entity collection. The normal EntityCollection() is still available, as for example design time databinding doesn't work with generics.

That's great to hear that V2 will take advantage of some of the new features of .NET 2.0. I understand that winforms databinding does work currently but as mentioned i am designing apps for the web only at this point so not much help to me personally.

Did I understand correctly, V2 definately will support design time databinding and definately be out this week, April 25th - 29th?

KastroNYC wrote:

That's great to hear that V2 will take advantage of some of the new features of .NET 2.0. I understand that winforms databinding does work currently but as mentioned i am designing apps for the web only at this point so not much help to me personally.

Well, asp.net 1.x style databinding (1-way) still works, the design time part is broken currently though and also the new features like filtering based on parameters set by other controls on the page isn't supported at the moment in v1.0.2005.1. Those things among others are added in v2

Did I understand correctly, V2 definately will support design time databinding and definately be out this week, April 25th - 29th?

Definitely support design time databinding and the beta is scheduled for the end of this week, unless a showstopper pops up, but according to how things are progressing at the moment it's very likely it's the end of hte week or very very close to that. (Features have been done, the API is currently being cleaned up as well as the templates, and some bugs are needed to get fixed prior to the beta)

Thanks greatly for updating me on the scheduled beta release date its much appreciated. Hope I don't sound too rude, i'm just kinda tee'd that its taking me some time to understand how to get things working properly, as a developer I'm sure you understand my frustration.

On a side note (and sorry if I should have started another thread for this), is there a way currently (in 1.0.2005.1) using WebForms to data bind individual fields to text boxes, list boxes, etc? I understand that no databinding can be preformed in design time but can this be accomplished in code? I'm using self-servicing templates.

Thanks again for a wonderful product and incredible support!

-Kas

KastroNYC wrote:

Thanks greatly for updating me on the scheduled beta release date its much appreciated. Hope I don't sound too rude, i'm just kinda tee'd that its taking me some time to understand how to get things working properly, as a developer I'm sure you understand my frustration.

Sure. Upgrading is always a bit of a pain, and if the stuff you need isn't there yet, it can be a problem.

I share your frustration on the changes in databinding on webforms. Not only is it a totally unnecessary change, it also will be a big problem for people who have a lot of asp.net 1.x forms and want to migrate to asp.net 2.0: ALL datasources dragged onto a webform won't be there anymore. This means that EVERY webform out there has to be re-done.

This is valid for EVERY webapp out there and no matter what datasource you're using, be it datasets or llblgen pro collections...

For me it was a very frustrating experience to write a datasourcecontrol without any documentation (there is hardly any documentation on these, I had to decompile almost every datasourcecontrol in asp.net 2.0) and with so little real gain. True, 2-way databinding is now 'possible', but it's still a trick which will eat OR bandwidth (viewstate caching) OR memory (session caching) and because there's no currency manager on a webform, it's still a sucky experience: if you want to create a master-detail webform with a single hierarchical datastructure, you're out of luck: you have to set up the syncing manually (you can do that through parameter binding in html, but still... it's a drag) .

And man can only fear what they have in store next, which will require again a rewrite of every databinding code out there. Now, if they only would FIX it for once...

On a side note (and sorry if I should have started another thread for this), is there a way currently (in 1.0.2005.1) using WebForms to data bind individual fields to text boxes, list boxes, etc? I understand that no databinding can be preformed in design time but can this be accomplished in code? I'm using self-servicing templates.

Textboxes is not worth the effort. The code to bind a textbox to an entity property is bigger than when you simply do: myTextBox.Text = myEntity.Field;

Listboxes etc, work the same as anywhere else: setup the valuemember, datamember and datasource and call DataBind(). (I could have the names wrong for datamember etc. )