Hi,

MySQL Connector/Net 5.0.0 Alpha 1 has been released. MySQL Connector/Net is an all-managed ADO.Net provider for MySQL.

While this release is suitable for any version of MySQL, it is strongly encouraged that this release not be used on any production data. This release has some features that are not yet complete and a few test cases that are not passing but is being made available to the public to gather feedback for the beta phase. Please see below for a list of the areas that are not complete or are not working.

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.0.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.)

Highlights in this release:

* Support for ADO.Net 2.0 interfaces and subclasses

--------------------------------------------------- Some schema collections are not 100% complete and we are not currently doing anything with the System.Transactions namespace. This will change in future versions.

* Re-architected to improve speed and flexibility

-------------------------------------------------- The internals of the provider have been improved to allow column values to be retrieved without boxing in many cases. Also, the internal changes have enabled the future inclusion of embedded and client library support.

* Implemented Usage Advisor

--------------------------- The Usage Advisor first appeared in Connector/J. We have now implemented that feature in Connector/Net. Enabling it causes the provider to check both your queries and how you read the results and report to you if it thinks you are using the provider in an inefficient manner. It checks such things as using a query without an index, not reading all the columns or rows from a resultset, etc.

* Implemented asynchronous query methods

---------------------------------------- The MySqlCommand object now supports asynchronous queries. This is implemented using the BeginExecuteNonQuery and EndExecuteNonQuery methods. We will include BeginExecuteReader and EndExecuteReader in the first beta release.

* Implemented stored procedure metadata caching

----------------------------------------------- We now cache the metadata that is retrieved during stored procedure and stored function execution. This cache data is used for subsequent executions of that stored routine.

* Added PerfMon hooks

--------------------- This release includes PerfMon hooks to monitor stored procedure cache hits and misses. We are looking at adding additional hooks in the first beta release.

* Removed use of SharpZipLib library

------------------------------------ We have replaced use of the SharpZipLib library with the deflate support available with .NET 2.0.

Major things broken or missing?

------------------------------- * Connecting via shared memory or using compression * Load data local infile is not working * Use of System.Transactions * Foreign key support in GetSchema

Note: All these will be fixed by the time we ship the first beta release.

Support for embedded server and client library has been removed

------------------------------------------------------------------ For those of you that have seen my presentations on 5.0, we decided to remove these features to help get 5.0 out the door more quickly. These features will reappear in a later version of the product.

Thank you for checking out this release of Connector/Net. We would like to have the 5.0 provider be released as GA by the end of August but this is only possible if our users test it and let us know what's wrong. Thanks again for your testing and feedback.

-Reggie