devart dotConnect MySQL

Question

I've been evaluating MindScape Lightspeed for the purpose of Model creation. So far I am satisfied. I was further looking for OOTB (actually some professional quality code) providers for MySQL for ASP.Net. I've come across 'dotconnect for MySQL' from Devart. This looks like fitting the bill for the latter requirement. It also has 'Entity Developer' for creating Entity Models (I discovered this a little late). I have however not evaluated this. I surely want to go ahead with dotconnect for the purpose of using various providers but I am not sure how good Entity Developer is in comparison to MindScape Lightspeed. This question stems from the fact that I am a very (ready as very very) small shop and I would like to invest smartly even if it is a matter of $100.

Answer 1

First off, I work for Mindscape - just to get the disclosure of the way :-) I'm not a devart customer and perhaps somebody could add additional information if they've used their tools. To state what the products are you're looking at:

Entity Developer - a designer tool for creating a model. It allows you to generate a model for LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities. There are already designers provided to do this by Microsoft however the tools provided by devart appear to be superior and may be worth the price if you have issues with the default tools.

dotconnect for MySQL appears to be a provider that lets the Entity Framework talk to MySQL. By default the Entity framework provides no capability for this but does provide a plugin framework so that developers can build providers (in this case, MySQL). I could be wrong here but that's how it looks. This means the ORM factor is controlled by Microsoft and you would have the capabilities and release cycle dictated by Microsoft (this can be a good or bad thing depending on your requirements :-)

LightSpeed on the other hand is a ground up ORM that Mindscape have developed. It does no re-use Microsoft technologies other than integrating our designer into Visual Studio. This means our ability to respond to requests is superior to that of Microsoft. We have baked in support for MySQL as well as many databases meaning if you purchase LightSpeed and later do another project using a different database engine you won't need to purchase another product. We have published a rough guide to the underlying differences between LightSpeed and the Entity Framework in our orm comparison document (note: it's based on comparing to the Entity Framework delivered with .NET 3.5, not the one coming out next year).

In terms of the designer, I'm not sure how they compare in detail. The LightSpeed designer has supported schema round tripping for a long time (meaning if you change the model in the designer you can push changes to the database OR if you change the database you can right click and update the model based on the database changes - whatever works for you). With LightSpeed 3.0 which we released today, we also auto track migrations so that you do not need to manually create SQL files to migrate your database schema as you evolve your solution. If you wish to alter the templates for the generated code you are welcome to do so - which seems similar to what the devart designer allows.

Having said all this - if you're looking for Visual Studio support for the basic ASP.NET controls (like table adapters) then you would likely find a better bet with the devart product because it surfaces that sort of thing better. You can technically use LightSpeed with these by wrapping LightSpeed entities with an ObjectDataSource in most cases but it's an additional step.

On the whole, I can appreciate that the products appear similar-ish but are actually quite different at the same time. I haven't listed out pro's and con's because it absolutely depends on what you're looking for and the type of project you're building. I appreciate your feedback as you find out more - let me know what you discover :-)

Also - if you have any further questions or if you'd just like to have a chat about your requirements in more detail please use the contact form on our website - I'm happy to help!