Get ready for the goodness inside Telerik OpenAccess ORM Q1'13

We are releasing Q1 2013 within days and many of you have already asked what’s coming with Telerik OpenAccess ORM? That's why I've decided to shed some light on how the new version will help you achieve your goals even quicker than the previous ones.

First and foremost, as you are constantly dealing with bigger and bigger database schemas, we really wanted to make your life easier. Thus, we implemented for you the capability to split your model into many diagrams the Visual Designer. With its help, you will be able to define groups of similar or connected Domain Classes and manage the model complexity much faster. To speed up the process we have developed the Include Related and Include Hierarchy commands which automatically make classes associated with a particular class a part of the same diagram. Furthermore, the Add New Domain Model wizard will offer you the option to create a diagram for each database schema as this is one of the natural distributions of classes you might need. Don't worry about migrating your old models - the code remains completely unchanged regardless of the diagrams you decide to use!

A feature that you do not usually find in Object Relational Mappers is the support for data streaming. This is something you will be able to use "out of the box" with Q1 2013 of OpenAccess – both for reading and for writing large varbinary columns through streams. You can even update or append bytes to the current value by just setting a simple flag. To make it more flexible, we are still offering you the old approach of using byte arrays to map such columns, but now you can also switch your mapping to a new OpenAccess type – BinaryStream – and start streaming large data arrays right away!

Another unique feature of OpenAccess you cannot frequently encounter is the dynamic definition of types and properties during runtime. These Artificial Types are now used easier than ever for your CRUD operations, through a new API available from the OpenAccessContext in Q1 2013! 

For the web developers among you, we have provided a while ago an ASP.NET Dynamic Data wizard, allowing you to create custom dynamic pages for each of your entities, with full CRUD capabilities. Now you can see that wizard using the DynamicRadGrid – an implementation of ASP.NET AJAX RadGrid allowing you to develop your application faster and in more convenient manner using Dynamic Data.

Many of you are using different versions of WCF Data Services, so we have decided to introduce support for 5.2 and in fact - any other version - by providing you with the sources for our oData implementation. When using Add OpenAccess Service wizard for generating an oData service, it will import several code files instead of assemblies. While the code will still work "out of the box", if you would rather prefer to use an older version of WCF Data Services (or for instance the release candidate for 5.3), you can avoid any possible roadblocks when implementing your N-Tier scenarios by just building the code against the release of your choice!

And finally, the OpenAccess SDK now comes with a new name – OpenAccess Samples Kit. Not only the name is changed – we have updated plenty of the examples and added several new ones! 

Stay tuned as we will continue unveiling more information on the new goodness inside the Q1 2013 that's coming soon!