.Net Framework 2005 (aka Whidbey) Beta2 Shipped! [Carl Perry]

  • Article

At long last we’ve completed and signed-off on Whidbey Beta 2!!!!! It’s been quite a long time since we started working on Beta 2; once this hits the web it will have been almost 9 months of bug fixing, security reviews, feature completion, and scrambling to complete it all. We took some significant risks in Beta 2, in particular the merging of the old in-proc provider with SqlClient, and they all paid off! You can find the main page for Visual Studio 2005, codenamed ‘Whidbey’, and the download point to Beta 2 here. Make sure to test all the key scenarios with this Beta and report as many bugs as possible. The sooner you report these bugs the more likely it is that we’ll fix them for RTM.

With that said, I’d like to give a quick list of all the features we worked on and completed in Whidbey Beta 2. It’s quite a big list and represents an excellent product that should help people building data access applications.

Here’s the high-level list of work we’ve completed in Beta 2

  • Provider Reliability
  • SQLCLR Reliability - Odbc, OleDb, Oracle, and Sql Client were all hardened for SQLCLR
    • Handle Recycling
  • DataSet Timezone support for UTC
  • Cross Version Serialization for all ADO.Net serializable types
  • Set Ordinal Support for DataColumns
  • Schema-less Typed DataSet serialization support
  • Fixing ConflictOptions/LoadOptions
  • Providing Layered Error Information from SNIX to SqlClient
  • Removing the PInvoke layer between SNIX and SqlClient - Look no exports!
  • IBC Support for System.Data (the managed version of BBT)
  • Removing the constant limitation customers hit for Batch Updating with Parameters and Batched insert statements
  • RANU Support
  • User Instance support
  • Data Directory support for OleDb, Odbc, and SqlClient
  • InProc (1 small word doesn’t even begin to imply the work required to complete this)
  • Removing ISql Interfaces
  • BID Infrastructure Update
  • Canceling a command in Async mode
  • DbProviderException – Introduced a common exception all our provider exceptions inherit from
  • Provider Specific type enumeration discovery on the Parameter classes
  • Fixing a number of bugs that would have been breaking changes from Everett
  • Removing un-needed or invalid API’s in Whidbey
  • Fixing all remaining Design Guideline issues
  • Security Code Reviews
    • Along with all the fixes!
  • Lots of bug fixes
  • Robustness work for test cases
  • Adding Performance tests for key scenarios
  • And a whole lot more!

As noted above, make sure to start playing with this right away and give us all the feedback you can.

Carl Perry
Program Manager – ADO.NET

Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2005
    What about Nullable support?
  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2005
    Why is the System.Data.Sql namespace still there?
  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2005
    After installing VS Beta 2 and April CTP of SQL 2005, I noticed that the "SqlServer Project" template is no longer available in VS. Can this be re-enabled, and if not when is it coming back? Thx
  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2005
    Can a typed datatable in 2.0 be serialized (such as to asp.net session state) with out being attatched to a dataset and with Schema-less serialization?
  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2005
    Hi Ruben,

    >> What about Nullable support?

    Unfortunately, after weighting the resources that we had available and all the things we wanted to do for Whidbey, we decided that we won't introduce support for Nullable<T> in ADO.NET in Whidbey. We'll evaluate this in the next version and see what's the right thing to do for the ADO.NET API.

    -pablo
  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2005
    Hi Sahil,

    >> Why is the System.Data.Sql namespace still there?

    There are still a couple of classes there (e.g. SqlNotificationRequest). I agree that may be we should move them to System.Data.SqlClient, but I'm not sure if it's worth the shot, given that we might cause some existing app to break.

    That said, I'll look into that.

    -pablo
  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2005
    Thanks Pablo.
  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2005
    >>Can a typed datatable in 2.0 be serialized (such as to asp.net session state) with out being attatched to a dataset and with Schema-less serialization?

    Schemaless serialzation is only available on TypedDataSet, it's not available for TypedDataTable or untyped DataSet/DataTable.
  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2005
    On not supporting Nullable: I must say, I find it bewildering that a feature that was designed to remove some of the barriers between traditional programming languages and databases, won't be supported exactly at the layer that is causing the problems in the first place... Nice.

    Another thing, why are there no conversions defined between types like Nullable<Int32> and SqlInt32? Or Nullable<T> and DBNull? It almost feels like a boycot.
  • Anonymous
    May 06, 2005
    What is "BID Infrastructure Update" ?
    and what does B-I-D stand for?
  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2005
    After upgrading to Beta 2, the DataSet (DataComponent in B1) have stopped working. This worked with B1. If I do not use them and code sql statements in my code (which i'll never want), I can access the data. Even when I look at it thru' EM or QA, I can see it.