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Monday, March 21, 2011

SQL Server Compact Toolbox 2.1–Visual Guide of new features

Celebrating more that 20.000 downloads, version 2.1 of my SQL Server Compact Toolbox extension for Visual Studio 2010 is now available for download. This blog post is a visual guide to the new features included in this release, many suggested by users of the tool via the CodePlex issue tracker.

Generate an Entity Data Model (EDMX) in the current project in any applicable project (WPF, WinForms, Class Library)


As you may know, the tooling support for 4.0 is somewhat limited, and therefore you have to use various workarounds to generate an EDMX for a version 4.0 database in projects that are not Web based. Version 2.1 of my Toolbox adds the ability to run edmgen2 via a friendly dialog to generate and include an EDMX file in any applicable project type.

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(I will blog later about how I did this, using the edmgen2 project)

Remove invalid connection definitions from the Toolbox (and Server Explorer)

As you move SQL Server Compact files around and upgrade version 3.5 files to version 4.0, many of the connection entries in Server Explorer / the Toolbox become invalid. Therefore, I have added a menu option to remove broken connections.

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Option to display binary data in result

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Preventing invalid values in Max Database Size textbox

By using the NumericUpDown control from the Extended WPF Toolkit, it is no longer possible to enter invalid max database size values.

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For a similar overview of version 2.0 features, see this blog post.

Updated release of standalone version.

The standalone version for users not running Visual Studio 2010 Pro or higher, is also available in a new release, the main feature being, that it is now a single .exe, with only .NET 4.0 and SQL Server Compact 4.0 RTW required to be present on the system.

As always, please provide feedback, suggestions and reviews at the CodePlex site: http://sqlcetoolbox.codeplex.com

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