Data Access vNext is Our Most Powerful Version Yet

Every beginning has its … new beginning! Find out what the future of Data Access will look like, as a powerful data access framework deployed as a variety of NuGet packages.

For years we, the Data Access team, are striving to deliver to you the best and most relevant data access framework to help you solving core development problems. First, we provided mapping wizards, which helped you quickly resolve the common problem of producing classes out of tables of vice versa. We found out you needed more: a comprehensive visual designer to help you maintain your data access layer as your application evolves. And we delivered by producing a large set of design-time functionality designed to make your lives easier.

However, during all these years there was one thing that made our product unique on the market. Anyone can produce T4 templates for code generation. Many of our competitors were offering visual designers for a drag-and-drop workflow with the data access layer. But it is not that common to have an entire LINQ implementation which is completely independent from any framework on the market, providing solutions where others fail, even LINQ-like update and delete.

Most ORMs just do not have seamless operations with dynamically defined types at runtime. Supporting 15+ databases and executing over 500,000 tests every night is quite an unique offering as well, even without our Fluent API that allows you to configure your model so that the database can be switched with minimal additional efforts.

Furthermore, we agree with what our friends at Microsoft have already stated on the real value of code-only mapping and code-based data access. Most data access frameworks are nowadays lightweight frameworks deployed via NuGets or other basic models for deployment and referencing.

With all these unique offerings, and the morphing development needs, it is obvious to us that the Visual Studio integration is not our leading value proposition of our product, but just an addition. Therefore, we decided to deprecate the visual tooling of Telerik Data Access (which includes the Visual Designer and all Visual Studio integration features), and continue investing solely in our powerful runtime features and code-only (fluent) mapping.

Q2 2015 of Data Access will be the first release available only through NuGet packages, which will continue to be completely free for all of you.

Do not worry, we will even extend our offering to ensure nothing is missing in the variety of packages you can include in your applications.

What if I still need to use the Visual Designer?

You will be able to use older MSI installers of Telerik Data Access to continue using the visual tooling of the product.

What about support?

We will continue to support all of you, valued DevCraft customers, with the same quality and the same developers. If there is a critical problem with the Visual Designer, we will do our best to resolve it for you.

I am using the Visual Designer, but now I want to move to Fluent Mapping. How do I do that?

You can use this article for a detailed guideline how to move to Fluent Mapping and NuGet packages if you were using the Visual Designer mapping.