Way back in February I gave a webinar on using our Visual Studio integration product with MySQL.  At the time, our code did not integrate very well with the TableAdapter wizard.  To be precise, you really couldn't use stored procedures with a table adapter at all.  During the broadcast, someone asked me about using stored procedures and I told him that I would blog about it once I got it working.  Well, here we are.

Actually, we've had it working for a couple of weeks now but I'm just now getting to the blog post.  You know how it is.  There were several problems at play here but the biggest issues were the fact that we needed to provide an enumerator object for columns that would be returned by a stored procedure.  The second issue was needing to use the DbProviderSpecificTypeProperty attribute on our provider specific type property on the parameter class.  Let's look at each one of these in more …

MySQL Connector/Net 5.1.2 a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.

Connector/Net 5.1 represents a change in how we package our products. Until now, we've shipped our core provider and the Visual Studio integration bits as separate downloads. This has become a bit of a problem. Often we would fix a bug that involved changing code both in the VS package and in the core provider. This provided a versioning problem where users would need to upgrade both products to see the benefit of the bug fix. To solve this, we've decided to discontinue Tools for Visual Studio as a separate product and have, instead, integrated it into a new Connector/Net installer. We hope this provides a better "out of box" experience for our users.

All previous versions of Tools for Visual Studio should be uninstalled prior to installing this product.

Version 5.1.2 works with all versions of MySQL …

So I was surfing around Apple's website this afternoon and found this new Windows download called Safari.  Wondering what it is I downloaded and installed it.  Turns out it's a great memory stress tool.  Check out this screenie of it using nearly 300 megs on my Vista x64 system.

This is great!  I was able to see how all my other apps work in low memory situations.  As useful as that is, right before I was going to write this blog entry I discovered this wonderful app also renders web pages.  Holy cow!!  This is too much.  What are those Apple guys going to think of next?

I recently came across this blog post on using String.Compare instead of the tried and true method of converting one string to lowercase and comparing to a known lower case value.  It's important to remember that strings in .NET (as in Java) are immutable so the act of lower casing a string will always make a new string.  The memory subsystem for .NET is turned for  handling lots of small objects but the fewer objects you create, the fewer that have to be checked and managed by the garbage collection system.

Still I wondered what the time difference would be between the two approaches.  So I setup a very simple test where I compared the string "FooBar" to a string variable that contained the value "foobar" one million times.  The first test used the approach of …

I've been following the comments to Jamie's latest post and I have to say that most of the people who left comments are not thinking logically about this.  Most (not all) are outraged that Microsoft would try to prevent Jamie from enabling his most excellent TestDriven.Net product on the Express line of products (Visual C# Express, etc).

As a consumer I would love to be able to use plugins in the Express products.  I use Visual C++ Express to code on the MySQL server frequently.  However, I'm smart enough to realize when I've been given something for free. Let me say this slowly and clearly:  Microsoft is a business, not a public service.  They didn't have to make the Express products available at all.  It takes a great deal of time and money to build something as complicated as these …

We are happy to announce that we have now enabled interim snapshots for Connector/Net 5.1.  It can be found at http://downloads.mysql.com/snapshots.php.

These will not currently update nightly.  In the future, we hope to enable nightly uploads of snapshots.  In the meantime, please take care when using these builds.  They are snapshots directly out of our development trees and are not guaranteed to function at all.  They are intended simply to give users and customers an advance look at what is coming in future released versions.
Thanks!

MySQL Connector/Net 5.1.1 a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.

This is a big release and represents a change in how we package our products. Until now, we've shipped our core provider and the Visual Studio integration bits as separate downloads. This has become a bit of a problem. Often we would fix a bug that involved changing code both in the VS package and in the core provider. This provided a versioning problem where users would need to upgrade both products to see the benefit of the bug fix. To solve this, we've decided to discontinue Tools for Visual Studio as a separate product and have, instead, integrated it into a new Connector/Net installer. We hope this provides a better "out of box" experience for our users.

All previous versions of Tools for Visual Studio should be uninstalled prior to installing this product.

Version 5.1.1 works with all …

It's not new (Yahoo! Pipes is already there) but the Visual Studio integration is the kicker.  Check it out:  http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/

Hi,

MySQL Connector/Net 5.0.7 a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.

This is a bug fix release for the current production branch of Connector/Net.

Version 5.0.7 is suitable for use with any MySQL version including MySQL-4.1, MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1 beta or the MySQL-6.0 Falcon "Preview".

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.0.html and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Bugs fixed

• Bug #27269 MySqlConnection.Clone does not mimic SqlConnection.Clone behavior
• Bug #27289 Transaction is not …

This may be obvious to some but it wasn't to me so I thought I'd write about it.  Recently I discovered a problem with our implementation of DbConnectionStringBuilder.  Whenever you changed a field that took a string (i.e. character set or server), the connection string property would not update.  I know the changes were applied because I developed a test application that queried the connection string.  It was correct even though the UI of the property grid was not. 

After an embarrassingly long time working on this I emailed a friend of mine who I felt would know the answer.  Turns out he didn't but he knew someone who did and not more than 30 minutes after talking with him I had my answer.  Each property of MySqlConnectionStringBuilder needs to be decorated with the RefreshPropertiesAttribute.  This causes the property grid to refresh itself when they change.