In my last two blog posts (
here
and
here
, I discussed the scenarios that I'll have on mind when reviewing the two databases we've selected for our local storage reviews (VistaDB and db4o). This blog post and the next are about what I'll be looking for in the products (and also let me discuss why I'm not reviewing SQL Server Express or the Jet database that comes with Microsoft Access).
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/15/20103 comments
As I mentioned
in my last blog entry
, we picked out two databases to review for our "local database storage" review for the July issue timeframe: VistaDB and db4o. This blog (and the last) answer the question, "What do I mean by a local database?" I discussed one of the scenarios (performance enhancement) for local storage in my last blog.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/10/20100 comments
We picked out two databases for review in our July issue assessment of "local storage" tools: VistaDB (my choice) and db4o (on the recommendation of one of our readers). While the review of db4o regrettably didn't make it into print, you can expect to see my hands-on take appear on this site in the next week or so.
Regardless of which products appear in print, the next step in my review process was to define what functionality I'm supposed to be assessing. Or, to put it another way, what do I mean by a "local database"?
My assumption is that, by and large, developers create applications (Web or desktop) that update some remote data store. In that scenario, the developer might still want some place to store data on the local computer: the local storage. The data could range from user preferences, to sets of "working data," to downloaded data to be used for offline analysis.
The first scenario for using local storage is to improve performance by eliminating the round trip to the server. The alternative to using local storage is to load data into memory (and there are a bunch of in-memory databases that support that scenario). However, I'm assuming here that the developer wants some form of long-term persistence: the developer wants the data to stick around. In some cases, especially where the developer is going to be analyzing the data offline, the amount of data may be too large to hold in memory or the user is expected to add to the local data store over time. A related scenario is where the developer has data that doesn't need to be in the central store (e.g. the user preferences mentioned earlier) and decides to keep it locally.
I'm keenly interested in this topic because I've written a client-side, multi-threaded Windows service that is busy receiving data from a variety of sensor devices (the service spawns a client app for each sensor). As the client apps gather this data, they upload the data through a Web service to our server-side application, which parses the data and stores it.
My client would also like to extend the functionality of the Windows service to provide some near-realtime services at the client. To support that, in addition to parsing the data on the server, we'd also like to parse the data at the service to provide faster access to the embedded data. Since the parsing process is table-driven, this is going to involve keeping copies of some server-side data at the client.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/09/20100 comments
As parallel processing becomes main stream, tool vendors are moving to provide more support. See
my conversation with Stephen Forte
of tool vendor Telerik, who sees parallel processing and multicore support as having the single biggest impact on .NET development in the near future. The latest version of DevExpress' Refactor! and CodeRush (reviewed recently
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/06/20100 comments
DevExpress DXperience 10.1
We reviewed the DevExpress DXperience suite, which concentrated on Windows Forms and Web controls,
some time ago
. DXperience 10.1 (also called V2010 vol. 1) is now out, but it emphasizes support for WPF, Silverlight, and XAF.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/04/20100 comments
The current plan for the August issue of Visual Studio Magazine is to take a look at the new Visual Studio 2010 versions of the developer productivity add-ins Developer Express CodeRush and JetBrains ReSharper. Anything can happen ahead of our publishing deadlines, so no promises, but definitely look for these products in the VS Toolbox section of the magazine come August.
We looked at the Visual Studio 2008 versions of these two products last year. Check out Write Better Code, Faster, with ReSharper 4.5 from our September 2009 issue, and Turbo Charge Visual Studio with DevExpress CodeRush from our October 2009 issue. However, the significant changes with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 make it worthwhile to revisit these products, which have been substantially reengineered to work with the latest version of Visual Studio.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/04/20102 comments
Back when I
reviewed Nevron's Diagram for .NET
, I
wrote in a blog post
that it took some pressure off of me when I reviewed a unique product. As I poked around in the field, though, I found that there were any number of diagramming tools available. This is why I never say, "This is the best product." I just try to assess the product I'm reviewing on its own merits.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/03/20100 comments
In
my last blog entry
, I spoke with Mark Driver, a vice president at Gartner Research focusing on the Visual Studio market. In that talk, I got Mark's view of the Visual Studio/.NET toolspace. In this blog entry, I wanted to ask him about the large component suites.
Peter Vogel: Who buys the big component suites? Why?
Mark Driver: Generally, enterprise teams and large organizations -- teams building a pipeline of ongoing applications and turning out stuff pretty consistently. They don't want to build their user interfaces bit by bit, they want to avoid the "Visual spaghetti problem." It's the difference in the question you ask. Do you say "I only need one control, I don't need 20 controls?" Or are you looking for an ongoing, consistent user experience?
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/02/20100 comments
I spoke recently with Mark Driver, a Vice President at Gartner Research. Mark focuses on the Visual Studio market, so he seemed like an ideal person to provide some insight on how the Visual Studio/.NET tool market functions.
I had two sets of questions that I wanted to ask Mark. First, I was interested in the structure of the Visual Studio/.NET "toolspace" and his answers to those questions make up in this blog. Since we had recently reviewed Telerik's RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX (see the May issue review titled Adding AJAX with Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX), I also wanted to ask about the "suites" portion of the market. His answers to those two questions will be in my next blog entry.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/01/20100 comments
From looking at the documentation and what little server-side programming I've done with Telerik's suite, it looks like the controls work as well or better than the equivalent ASP.NET control from Microsoft (where an equivalent control even exists). I'm willing to imagine that, as a server-side control, their RadGrid may lack features that I like in some other company's Grid controls... but I'm not interested in doing a feature-by-feature comparison with every other suite because that would take something like forever.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/01/20100 comments
Back when I started, I used some new templates provided by Telerik to create a Web site where I could test their controls. Now that I'd gotten Telerik's controls onto the Toolbox, I figured that I should see if the controls would work on an "ordinary" site.
I opened one of my existing ASP.NET sites and dragged Telerik's DateTimePicker on to a page with ASP.NET's ScriptManager control. That got me two new DLLs in my bin folder (see figure 1). Other than adding a Register tag that referenced the Telerik DLL, nothing else seemed changed.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/27/20100 comments
Yesterday
I wrote in this blog
that I was considering upgrading from the Telerik trial version to the official non-trial version. But with my tight deadline (and the size of the suite) I decided not to risk shooting myself in the foot and to continue my testing with the trial version. If all goes well, I'll have a chance to re-test after doing an upgrade and see if anything goes horribly wrong -- which actually seems like a pretty good thing to find out about the product. You can read the initial VS Toolbox review of Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/26/20100 comments