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

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