Q1’11 Pre-Release Series: OpenAccess ORM Brings Design-time improvements, Updated Fluent Mapping API, and more

Q1 2011 will be a major milestone release for Telerik Open Access ORM, your .NET data programming and SQL expert. The new release will bring serious design-time improvements which will help you to work with data in an easier and more intuitive manner. A new fully featured project upgrade tool will allow you to upgrade even more classic projects to the new OpenAccess context API. The code-only developers will embrace the updated Fluent Mapping API, which exposes over 90% of OpenAccess' functionality. Finally, a project converter from Entity Framework will allow you to switch to Telerik OpenAccess in a few simple steps.

Design-Time Improvements

Most of the wizards and assistance dialogues got a major usability overhaul, making them not only slicker, but more powerful. Our choice of underlying technology for the overhaul was WPF to ensure that we will be able to provide not only vastly better user experience and fresh look and feel, but extensibility, which will allow us to improve the wizards in the future (for example to add a built-in help control to guide you through the wizard). Among the highlights are:

• The Association Editor has been completely revamped and will offer a considerable UI and functional upgrades. It will offer consistent behavior and will work not only for Reverse mapping (as the old one), but for Forward mapping as well. Double-clicking on an association in the designer will open the same Association Dialog every time, which means that you will not have to go to another place to edit associations. What is more, whereas the previous version of the association editor allowed working with tables and columns only (relational point of view), the new one will also allow you to work with classes and properties (objects point of view).
  
  
   
• The new version of the Update from Database Wizard will offer a hierarchical treeview which will show ALL database changes that can be applied to the model right away -- something that was not possible with the previous version of the wizard. Checkboxes in the treeview will give you the ability to check and see what items (tables, stored procedures, etc.) you will be updating.
  
  
   
• The Model Settings Dialog and Add New Domain Model Wizard will get better input validation and improved user experience. 

New Project Upgrade Tool

This super tool will upgrade even more classic OpenAccess projects to the latest OpenAccess Context API. This means that projects created with the classic wizards, regardless of whether they use Forward mapping, Reverse mapping, or both, will be converted.

Updated Fluent Mapping API

The Fluent Mapping API was another major focus for this release, which we are sure that code-only developers and MVC users will appreciate. The updated Fluent API will be more stable and will cover over 90% of the OpenAccess functionality.

Entity Framework Project Converter

The project converter from Entity Framework will allow you to convert an existing Entity Framework Model to the OpenAccess Domain Model. The converter will open a wizard which will guide you through the conversion process, which takes a few simple steps. A backup of the original project will be created, as well as a Conversion Log, which will show you details about the conversion in an easily readable format.

Want to learn the details?

Register for the Free Webinar now as seats are limited!

Webinar: OpenAccess ORM
Date: Thursday, March 24 Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

Register now >>