If you’ve been following some of the other blog posts on the DX site recently, you will be aware that we are currently planning our 9.X release cycle. So what can you expect as an XPO customer? Well this year we have decided to pay a lot more attention to XPO. Last year some of our customers, along with some of us here at Developer Express, felt that XPO had been neglected; this year we intend to rectify this. How will we rectify this? Well we’ve listened to our customers and we’ve come up with a lot of great features that will be introduced throughout the 9.X cycle.
These features include (in no significant order):
Persistent Interfaces
This will enable an XPO user to retrieve objects by specifying an interface. This will retrieve a group of objects, that might be of a different type, but that implement the desired interface.
Asynchronous Data Loading
The XPO team will introduce asynchronous data loading to XPO. Developer Express feels that Silverlight is an upcoming and important developer platform upon which XPO can deliver great benefits. This is one of two features DX are adding to XPO in order to support customers who are moving onto this platform.
In memory Data Store
The second feature we are adding to XPO to support our customer’s move onto the Silverlight platform, is a new in memory data store which will not be based on the DataSet. This will negate Siliverlight’s lack of support for datasets and will use less memory, thus making it more performant.
DateTime Operations
As you’ll know different RDBMS handle dates, and date parts (day, week month, etc), in differing ways. The XPO team will introduce an abstraction layer which will allow you to handle dates in a uniform manor regardless of the underlying supported RDBMS.
Provider Independent Data Definition Language
The data definition language differs across each RDBMS we support. The XPO team will introduce a layer that will allow abstracted schema updates regardless of which supported RDBMS you are using.
ADO.net Data Services
During the 9.X release cycle the XPO team will introduce support for ADO.Net Data Services, for more information on this technology, visit the ADO.Net web site.
Am sure you’ll agree with me that these are a great set of features, but the good news doesn’t stop there! XPO has had a new resource allocation, and we have a lot of great ideas. This means that, hopefully, we’ll be able to deliver even more features for XPO in the coming year. For example, we are planning great things like multi-tier support, both in and outside of Silverlight, though the plans aren't quite concrete enough to be included here explicitly.
As always we’ll be continuing to solicit your feed back via the forums and blog post comments, so please continue to engage with us throughout the 9.X cycle and together we’ll make XPO into the successful product we all want it to be.