How to install and use your extension the right way

Hi,

as I said, I am happy with your extension, but I have a question about the right use and installation.

When I download the designer from your website and e.g. in Firefox chose "open" instead of "save file", the designer opens with an installation process which runs fine till the end.

After that the designer is available in my VS2010 Professional - fine.

But when I do a new project none of the required nhibernate dlls is added to the project.

On my Win7/64 the installation of your extension is under:

C:\Users\Chef\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions\Mindscape\Mindscape NHibernate Model Designer\2.0.243.19740

And all the required dlls inside this and the sub folder

C:\Users\Chef\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions\Mindscape\Mindscape NHibernate Model Designer\2.0.243.19740\Resources\NHibernateAssemblies.zip

Within this zip e.g. there are the LinFu.DynamicProxy.dll and NHibernate.ByteCode.LinFu.dll which needs to be in my project output directory to run properly.

This seems a bit messed up to me.

Thanks!

When you add a new model to your project, and you choose the "Add NHibernate DLL References" option, we attempt to unzip the DLLs from that file, copy them to the folder you specified in the New Model wizard (e.g. ...\Lib), and add DLL references to your project. Is this not happening for you? What are you seeing instead? Are the DLLs unzipped but no references added? Is the Lib folder created but the DLLs not unzipped to it? Nothing happens at all?

N.B. We add a reference to NHibernate.ByteCode.LinFu.dll but not LinFu.DynamicProxy.dll -- the latter is no longer required as its functionality has been incorporated into the former.

Very strange. On my Win7/64 Desktop it works and on my Vista Notebook it hasn't worked that way. That's why I asked.

I need to check this again with a new project tomorrow,

Thanks!

Ok, I checked it today. I did some tries and for around 50% the "setup process" after adding a NHibernate Modell from within VS stopped. No dialog to setup identifier and no option to copy the required dlls to the lib folder - strange.

Wow, that is strange. When you say 'stopped' do you mean it crashed, or wouldn't allow you to proceed to the last couple of steps, or didn't appear at all?

Did it sometimes work and sometimes stop on the same machine, or was it consistently okay on one machine and wrong on the other? Did it sometimes work and sometimes stop if you added multiple models to the same project, or was it consistently okay in some project and consistently wrong in others? It sounds like it was irregular, but if you did spot any pattern like these then that would be really helpful in getting it fixed for you!

The error is like this:

You have a new VS project, you select to add a model. You name the model and proceed and instead of the "setup dialog" of the Designer, you are immediately at the blank model tab where you can add entities.

So you have no identifier setup, no option to copy the dlls etc.

Kay

Hi Kay,

Can you confirm that the wizard appears on one machine (the Vista notebook) but does not appear on the other (the Vista notebook)? If so, could you check the version on the Vista notebook? (The version number is shown on the Installed Extensions tab in Extension Manager.) It sounds like that machine may still have version 1.x on it; the wizard was only added in version 2.0.

Ok again and with screenshots:

I have my desktop machine (Win7/64) where everything works fine.

I have my laptop with VISTA/32 where these problems occur (but not every time, let's say 50%/50%).

And I bought the Designer last week and I use V2 and tested the nightly builds also.

Szenario:

1. Start a new project within VS 2010 Professional (see project_1.jpg)
2. Add a new element (see project_2.jpg)
3. After confirming with "Add" (Hinzufügen) you come immediately to 4.
4. The blank model area appears (see project_3.jpg). No setup dialog for the designer appears (where you setup the identifiers, chose to copy the dlls, etc.)

Kay

Hello Kay,

We're just doing a bit of a cleanup on the forums and I wanted to check whether you were still experiencing this issue. I've seen several more recent posts from you, so you obviously have things working, but wasn't sure whether that was because the problem went away or just because you are working in an existing model and haven't needed to add new ones. Thanks!

Hi Ivan,

everything fine here :-)

My actual project is my first O/R project and your designer helped me a lot to save time and to make database handling easy.

Although I am still looking for an easy way to deploy my database to a target environment.

Perfect scenario for me would be:

1. the customer creates a database (on e.g. his MySQL server)
2. I can run a sql script to create the database structure and to insert system specific, inital data from my installer or a separate program.

Thanks, Kay

You can create a SQL script using the migrations feature or by doing an Update Database against a blank database with the Log SQL option checked. You can then run this script over a MySqlConnection just like any other chunk of SQL.

Alternatively, for most cases, you can run migrations directly from your own application. This helps with the case where the customer already has an old version of your application and you need to upgrade the database schema (e.g. adding just the new tables) rather then recreating it from scratch.

The migrations package doesn't provide support for inserting initial data, but you can do this either by running custom SQL, or by using NHibernate itself to insert your initial data.