I blogged about this earlier but the MySQL Conference for 2007 is fast approaching and the call for papers is about to close.  November 7th is the deadline so you've only got two days left to send in those great presentation ideas.  I'm submitting a couple of sessions so hopefully I'll see you there!

Hi,

MySQL Connector/Net 1.0.8 RC has been released.  MySQL Connector/Net is an all-managed ADO.Net provider for MySQL.  While this release is suitable for any version of MySQL, it is strongly encouraged that this release not be used on any production data. 

IMPORTANT
We are making this release available as an RC because there were significant changes made to the provider beyond just simple bug fixes.  Due to this, we felt it prudent to ask for feedback from the community before declaring the provider safe for production use.  We plan to release the next version (1.0.9) as GA within the next 2-3 weeks incorporating any feedback we get from the community.

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at …

Today we have released MySQL Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.0.1 beta -- a downloadable plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 that allows Windows developers to quickly build MySQL data-driven applications with Visual Studio. With this plug-in, developers will be able to create, modify and manage MySQL database objects with an easy-to-use interface from within the Visual Studio IDE. This product is delivered as a package compatible with Visual Studio

2005 and delivers the following features:

• DDEX (Data Designer Extensibility) compatibility
• Ability to work with MySQL objects (tables, views, stored procedures, etc) from within Server Explorer

Note
It is critical that this release only be used with Connector/Net 5.0.1. After installing Connector/Net 5.0.1, you will need to make a small change in your machine.config file. This file should be located at …

MySQL Connector/Net 5.0.1 Beta has been released. MySQL Connector/Net is an all-managed ADO.Net provider for MySQL. While this release is suitable for any version of MySQL, it is strongly encouraged that this release not be used on any production data. This release is feature complete with the exception of DTC support in System.Transactions.

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.)

Highlights in this release:

Support for ADO.Net 2.0 interfaces and subclasses
(this release now includes foreign key support)

…

Yup.  It's time to start thinking about another MySQL Conference.  The Call for Participation is now up and I've been told that we will definitely have a Windows/.NET track again this year.  The Conference will be held at the same location as last year from April 23 to April 26, 2007.  Our conferences have grown every year and I expect this year to be no different, so get those proposals in before the November 7 deadline and hopefully I'll see you there!

If you want to play with the next generation of ADO.NET, now's your chance.  The ADO.Net team has released the August CTP for download.

The bits are young and fresh but they give you an idea of where Microsoft is heading.  I can't commit to a timeframe, but we are working on the next generation of our .NET provider which will be compatible with vNext.

Note: The May LINQ CTP is a pre-requisite.

Yes, that's right. You can start looking for airborne swine! We have released the first drop of Connector/Net 5.0! While there were reasons why this release took so long to get out, I'll take a page from Ballmer's book and commit to you that it won't happen again. In any case, this release has lots of goodies baked in.

• ADO.Net 2.0 support
• Usage Advisor
• PerfMon hooks
• Completely virtualized execution pipeline (this will support use of the client library and embedded server later)
• Faster execution
• Type safe methods on MySqlDataReader completely avoid value boxing
• Procedure metadata caching
• New option for not resetting the connection on pool checkout
• And much more!

There are a few things broken or missing in this first code drop. Here is the current list.

• Connecting via shared memory or using …

I'm working on a Visual Studio package for MySQL and discovering that it is possible to write hundreds of pages of documentation and still not be able to answer some of the most basic questions.  Microsoft does it over and over again. 

In this case I'm using managed code to create a custom editor for our database objects (think Server Explorer).  I don't want to register a file extension.  After considerable trial and error, I got  a chunk of code working.  This code called IVsUIShellOpenDocument.InitializeEditorInstance and IVsUIShell.CreateDocumentWindow and my editor appeared.  However, it would not prompt to save when the window pane was closed.  GetDocumentInfo showed an edit lock on my document but UnlockDocument could not remove it.

I replaced this code with simpler code that called IVsUIShellOpenDocument.OpenSpecificEditor and my documents suddenly started prompting to save …

Alot of people ask me why Connector/Net does not allow converting of field values to various primitive types simply by calling the appropriate GetXXX methods on the datareader.  To better understand what they are asking, consider the case where you have a table with the first column of type int32.  For whatever reason, you've decided that you want that value to be in a long primitive.  So you do what seems logical and call GetInt64() on the reader object.  You are then greeted with an odd InvalidCast exception.  This seems strange considering that an int32 primitive can easily be cast to an int64 primitive simply by using the appropriate cast syntax.  Indeed this does seem odd until you understand what is going on under the hood.   When Connector/Net reads the resultset values off the wire, it parses that data into the appropriate primitives based on the field type reported by MySQL.  So INT columns are …

MySQL Connector/Net 1.0.7, a new version of the fully-managed, ADO.Net provider for the MySQL database system has been released.  <?xml:namespace prefix="o" ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"?>This release is the latest production release of the 1.0 series and is suitable for use with any MySQL version including MySQL 4.1 or 5.0.

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/1.0.html and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point in time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Now that .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 have RTM?ed, we are now including .NET 2.0 binaries in our distribution.  Users should …