Well, almost five months passed since the last Retina.NET release (1.0.0.4) and I can't believe that we are close to the middle of this 2005 year, full of spectations.

I have been working hard since that last release to improve things in Retina.NET, and I must say that we are very close to a new release.

Saddly, I am almost alone in this task as I haven't received much support or help from the community (with a few exceptions, of course), despite the good comments received about the capabilities, ease of use and "feeling" about Retina.NET. I also have dedicated some time to my other pet project SharpHsql and that doesn't help me to get things done faster.

Well, even that I managed to advance steadly in the development of the next Retina.NET version, and the good news are that I am getting pretty close to finish it. This version includes some very interesting new features such as:

• Support for full inheritance.
• Support for Lazy load and Delay load of related entities and child collections.
• Generation of Identity values on the database.
• A new Criteria object model with support for string criteria parsing that is expression safe.
• Support for new DataTypes.
• Better support for NullableTypes and SqlTypes.
• Some more...

Well, I will be discussing some of those points in future posts, and looking forward to get the next version of Retina.NET out of the door as fast I can.

Best regards,

Andrés G Vettori
MCSE/MCSD/MCT
Leader of the C# Community of the Microsoft Users Group Argentina

3 Comments

• David Hayden said Tuesday, May 17, 2005 8:23:00 PM

  I have been anxiously awaiting this new version ever since you mentioned it a couple weeks ago. I have probably been checking GDN every couple of days for the new drop :)
  
  When you finish the new version and make it available for download I will definitely spend some time with it and give you some quality feedback!
  
  

• Srdjan said Tuesday, May 17, 2005 8:58:00 PM

  I have been using SharpHSQl for a some specific tasks and liked it...
  definatelly looking forward to give Retina.NET a try too...
  
  btw, will new version use .NET 2.0?

• Andrés G Vettori said Wednesday, May 18, 2005 8:26:00 AM

  Thanks you both for your support! I'ts very much appreciated.
  
  Regarding the .NET 2.0 question, I have compiled Retina.NET with Beta1 and Beta2 without a problem, but I think that releasing just a recompiled binary no justify the version change. Maybe I can release the same version only recompiled for .NET 2.0 but still exists the problem with the referenced assemblies (Log4Net, NullableTypes) that not support .NET 2.0 Runtime yet.
  
  Retina.NET will definitely get a .NET 2.0 version with support for the new features of the new runtime, but it's still unclear the timeframe of that as I depend on external libraries.
  
  Best regards,
  
  Andrés.