Discussion of "what we're working on"

[Andrea]

Guy, let's use this thread to discuss we what announce in the thread "what we're working on".
The reason for this is that I just made a Yahoo pipe including that thread and it would make more sense using it a sort of blog to push news and stuff... by the way the pipe is here and you can also subscribe to it on our website.

Thanks!

Andrea

[Andrea]

Two posts originally on that thread:

Amazingly most excellent! Is it possible to "save as" a combined DB into the dropbox folder?

and

Instead of making a proprietary client-server thingy, we'll use a normal database (Microsoft SQL Server Express)
This is actually the most normal thing to do... So, what will happen is that there will be a number of Tabbles-clients who instead of keeping the database in memory all the time will use a normal database to store/retrieve data.
This gives a number of advantages compared to the first experiment we did, above all scalability and performances. It will require the users to install the MS SQL database (the Express version is free with the only limitation that the db has to be smaller than 4GB - which shouldn't be an issue for us as our dbs are typically 30-40MB

Did your hear about the ongoing release of SQL Server CE 4 ? Scott Guthrie mostly focus his blog post on ASP.NET, but this solution still works for standard client app. There are a lot of benefits using CE instead of Express :
- No setup (xcopy deployment)
- Single file per db
- Runtime size
- Concurrency (it's only a new feature if you compare with SQL Server CE 3.5)

You can for now test with SQL Server CE 3.5, then go with SQL Server CE 4 when the first beta will be out.

(There is also esent which is an embedded db library native on windows, so it's available for all users without any install, have a look !)

Guys, we love you!
Styx31: I guess it's the first time we hear of it, but it would indeed make sense... we had a look at sqllite, but since it didn't support Linq, Maurizio decided to opt-out. Thanks a bunch for the brilliant hint!

Andrea

[Maurizio]

we had a look at sqllite, but since it didn't support Linq, Maurizio decided to opt-out.

Andrea

not because of linq, but because it is serverless. We need a server to execute queries and then return just the result to the client.