Open Discussion & Feature Requests

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

Ken Evans — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:06:29 GMT

Hi Chris,

You can download the VS2010 version from the Library:

http://www.ormfoundation.org/files/folders/norma_the_software/entry2427.aspx

Ken

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

chrissorens — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:48:28 GMT

Where do you get the VS 2010 version. I have tried source forge, but the installers always error and say I need VS 2008 or
VS 2005. I am on windows 7 and only have VS 2010. Thanks.

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

halcwb — Sun, 29 May 2011 19:07:08 GMT

Ken Evans:
halcwb:
I can not find the normal NORMA navigation tree at the right side of my screen?

Please would you clarify what you mean by "normal NORMA navigation tree".
Do you mean the toolbox, the ORM Tool window menu or something else?
Thanks
Ken

Oops, sorry, my mistake, I already found it. I ment the ORM Modelbrowser. In my VS2008 installation it was already showing when opening an ORM file. But by right clicking in an ORM file I found it. Thank you for the quick reply. An unrelated question is whether support for the TimeStamp data type will be included in the NORMA tool? That would be great. Thanks -- Casper

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

Ken Evans — Sun, 29 May 2011 17:34:36 GMT

halcwb:
I can not find the normal NORMA navigation tree at the right side of my screen?

Please would you clarify what you mean by "normal NORMA navigation tree".

Do you mean the toolbox, the ORM Tool window menu or something else?

Thanks

Ken

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

halcwb — Sun, 29 May 2011 16:50:23 GMT

I have ported my ORM files from VS2008 to VS2010, and everything seems to work well, thought I did not do much with the ORM project yet. Only, I can not find the normal NORMA navigation tree at the right side of my screen? Is this a bug?

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

dettner — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:54:16 GMT

Exiting news!

Thank you, Matthew!!! I will check this out at once.

Regards/Fredrik

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

Matthew Curland — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 06:52:27 GMT

Hi All,

I've posted the new version with support for VS2010. There are some minor items still to fix (listed in the readme), but I don't anticipate these causing any major problems.

I appreciate everyone's patience while I've added 2010 support. I've been using the tool steadily for several weeks now and have worked through a number of issues with the new platform. The final file change count was 407 for the core NORMA sources, 12 for PLiX, and 166 in other private extensions, so just managing the checkin process took me more than a day of work.

VS2010 is definitely a new platform and has some odd issues I haven't seen on the other versions. Hopefully Microsoft will release an SP1 that tightens things up and increases some of the performance slowdowns.

Please let me know of any problems you have with the tool. Both the VS2010 bits and the cross-model drag components are significant changes.

-Matt

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

Clifford Heath — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:23:09 GMT

JParrish:
L2S does a good job of generating a series of classes from the database, but the object model that you get is a one to one rendition of the physical model.

The problem here is that L2S doesn't really support anything other than a one-to-one mapping. That is, it has nothing like the Entity Framework's ComplexType. ComplexType would have been useful for modeling absorbed entity types. While it's possible to fake-up complex types using custom property types (see http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/csharp/Complex-Types-in-LINQ-to-SQL-Reloaded.aspx, you lose automatic change tracking. I think this problem can possibly be addressed, by changing the custom property object constructor so it has a reference to the object into which it's absorbed (and so can report changes), but I haven't tried that. It depends on whether you can get sufficient control of the object instantiation layer which calls the constructor.

You also don't get an identity map for the complex types, so if a query for Customers yields two records that absorb the same Address, you get two Address objects, not one. That's because L2S only uses a primary key identifier field to address its identity map, not (as in the case of an absorbed Address) all fields.

Another way to handle it would be to handle the absorbed entity as a C# struct, and I think it would be possible to get proper change tracking that way, though you still wouldn't have an identity map for the entity.

JParrish:
Are there any extensions to NORMA that generate C# object models

ActiveFacts generates an object model from either CQL or NORMA. Currently, there is no L2S (or other C#) generator. I've just been looking at what it would take to build one however. How much do you want one? :)

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

richardlwarren2 — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 15:20:39 GMT

Matt,

Thanks for the update. I'm really looking forward to the VS2010 version.

We're having to shift between VS2008 and VS2010 only because of NORMA. I'm modeling the new carbon sequestration for Class VI wells permit database to support our recently finalized rule on that subject (http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/wells_sequestration.cfm) with ORM in VS2008 but the rest of the team is in VS2010, tied together with TFS and Project Server 2010. Moving the model to VS2010 will reduce the versioning complexity...;-)

Richard

US Environmental Protection Agency
Office of Water | Immediate Office | Project Management Office
1200 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20460
Voice: (202) 564-4876

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010 - Color Printing Update

Ken Evans — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:07:34 GMT

First the good news:
Microsoft has responded to requests for color printing in Visual Studio 2010 by announcing a free color printing extension.
Read more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/

Now the bad news:
This feature is only available in Visual Studio 2010 Pro, Premium, or Ultimate because the Express editions do not support extensions.

An alternative:
You can print in color from VS 2010 Express by cutting and pasting from VS 2010 into another program that supports color printing such as Word of VS 2008 Pro.

Ken

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

Ken Evans — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:33:32 GMT

Matt,

That's great progress.

I hope that you will be able to "work around" a VS2010 "feature" that may affect NORMA users on VS2010.
The "feature" is that code in VS2010 will not print in color.

I was a bit mad about this because two weeks ago, I bought an A3 color printer so that I could print VS code in color.
Initially, I thought the shiny new printer was at fault and it took me quite a while to isolate the "fault" to VS2010.

When I asked Microsoft about it (on 12 November 2010), this is what the program manager of the VS2010 editor team said :

"...we rewrote the Visual Studio editor for VS 2010.
Unfortunately there were features that we couldn't get done in this product cycle, and color printing is one of those features.
I'm unfortunately resolving this bug as Won't Fix for VS 2010, but it will remain in our database and is high on our list of features to add back in the next release.
As you've noticed, black and white printing is still available for VS 2010. While it's not ideal, you can also potentially work around the absence of color printing by copying code into another application (e.g. MS Word) for printing.
Visual Studio's RTF copy/paste functionality allows syntax coloring to persist when copying and pasting into another rich text editor like Word."

So, if your tests show that NORMA won't print in color on VS2010, you now know why!

Ken

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

Tyler Young — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:21:22 GMT

WOW!! Holy smokes you work fast when you get the opportunity. I can't wait to try it out! Thank you for the incredible amount of work that's gone into this.

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

John Saunders — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:50:21 GMT

Thanks, Matt, that's great progress.

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

Matthew Curland — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:41:57 GMT

Update:

It has been a lot of work, but I have almost all of the NORMA bits working on VS2010 now. VS2010 has some significant platform changes (code generators (generated code cannot be shared as with VS2005/VS2008), package registration (build, setup, extension registration), editor back end (fact editor), property descriptor handling (properties window), toolbox population (self-explanatory), mouse actions (toolbox interactions and constraint editing), and many more small things).

The three parts I haven't done are code generation (Microsoft deprecated most of Microsoft.Build.Engine, and it will take me at least a day to rewrite the ORMCustomTool project file interactions), Database import (should be straightforward), and Setup (aforementioned changes to package registration will modify data). At this point, I'll be modeling flat out for at least a week using the platform, so I should be able to iron out any remaining issues, then finish up these work items. I should get a release out in a couple of weeks once I'm comfortable with the modifications.

Thanks for being patient, I know not having this is hindering NORMA use for a lot of you. The current change set has 317 files in the core repository with several more to go, so please be patient for a bit longer while I get some product-use time in and make sure things are stable and consistent.

-Matt

Re: Support for Visual Studio 2010

Tyler Young — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:02:30 GMT

YOU HAVE CROSS-MODEL DRAG-DROP???!!?!?!?!!

That's a very popular feature request among students.