Connector/Net 6.0 Alpha has been released

[Reggie Burnett]

Hi,

MySQL Connector/Net 6.0.0, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver 
for MySQL has been released.  This is an alpha release and is intended 
to introduce you to the new features and enhancements we are planning.  
This release should not be used in a production environment. 

We had three major goals with this release.  Speed, Entity Framework 
support, and a better Visual Studio experience.  I'm happy to report 
that we have met all three.  Please see the complete list of changes below.

It is now available in source and binary form from 
[http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.0.html] and mirror sites 
(note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time 
- if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later 
or choose another download site.)

- Massive speedups.  We have increased the speed of the provider.  In 
many situations it now matches or exceeds the speed of the native C 
connector.
- SQL tokenizing has been improved dramatically.  Not only is it 
substantially faster (approx 40%) it also now uses a completely 
rewritten tokenizer that supports all types of stored procedure comments.
- Added UDF schema collection
- Implement initial Entity Framework support (see below)
- Improved Visual Studio integration (see below)

Entity Framework support
-------------------------------------
Yes, we are late to the party but we are here.  I apologize for the 
delays related to this release and I hope that those of you looking to 
use MySQL with the entity framework will still want to give us a look.  
This releases uses a entity framework engine that was completely 
developed in-house and is, therefore, licensed in exactly the same way 
as our core provider.  Please remember that this is an alpha release and 
we are certain that you will find databases that will not 
reverse-engineer correctly or you will build models or queries that will 
not generate correctly. Please file those as bug reports and include all 
the information you can.  We'll quickly get to those as we are going to 
move as quickly as possible to GA.

Visual Studio improvements
---------------------------------------
Even though these improvements did not make the cutoff for this alpha, 
you will see them in the next drop.  We have completely rewritten our 
Visual Studio integration bits and are delivering several exciting 
features with it.  Here's a look at some of those features:

1.  Now uses the same toolbars and commands as SQL Server so the 
integration is much more seamless.
2.  Uses the native code editor which means code splitting and syntax 
highlighting.
3.  Change script generation
4.  And many more smaller features.....

Please take this version for a test drive and let us know what works and 
what doesn't.
Reggie