SQL Server Compact ASP.NET Membership, Role and Profile Provider version 2.1 now available

My ASP.NET membership provider is now available in version 2.1, that contains many improvements and some new features based on excellent community feedback – keep it coming!

The ASP.NET membership provider project was prompted last July by the comments to Scott Gu’s blog post about the upcoming version 4.0 of SQL Server Compact, and it’s support for ASP.NET.

Basically the Gu said: “We are looking to potentially ship a set of providers that work with it (and do not use stored procedures). The first beta won't have this - but it is something we'll hopefully enable in the future.”

So it was time to start coding, since the absence of a Membership provider would make SQL Server Compact less of an attractive option for ASP.NET web sites.

Since then, the database schema used has been refactored to be in line with the ASP.NET 4.0 SQL Server based schema, which resulted in the first NuGet Package being released in January 2011.

Now version 2.1 is available, also via NuGet:

Or from the CodePlex site.

The new features in version 2.1 are:
Profile provider included (contrib davidsk)
Two new methods: UpdateUserName and MigrateMembershipDatabaseToAspNet40 (contrib nekno)

Bug fixes (by various contributors, thank you all):
UpdateUser() doesn't set LoweredEmail
GetUser w/ providerUserKey returns invalid information
Static salt leads to deterministic output, dynamic salt is better
Configuration error when using a provider

Scripting image column data for INSERT statements

I earlier blogged about scripting datetime values for INSERT statements, or for example by use in the SubmitSQL method of the SQL Server Compact RemoteDataAccess API. In this post, I will show how to serialize byte arrays as a hexadecimal string. Notice that for the SubmitSQL method, there is a limit to the size of the SQL statement (not sure what is is, but 64 K is a good guess, I think). So if you have large images, that you want to send to your server, you are out of luck with this method.

Below is the code I currently have implemented in my ExportSqlCE INSERT statement generator.

if (dt.Columns[iColumn].DataType == typeof(Byte[]))
{
    Byte[] buffer = (Byte[])dt.Rows[iRow][iColumn];
    _sbScript.Append("0x");
    for (int i = 0; i < buffer.Length; i++)
    {
        _sbScript.Append(buffer[i].ToString("X2", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));
    }
}

Notice the special “X2” string format, this is what performs the magic of creating the hex string. Prepending the string with 0x is required by SQL Server. (_sbScript is a StringBuilder)

There is a long discussion on Stackoverflow on how to do this faster, the code below seems to be the fastest:

private static string ByteArrayToHex(byte[] barray)

{


char[] c = new char[barray.Length * 2];


byte b;


for (int i = 0; i < barray.Length; ++i)


{


b = ((byte)(barray[i] >> 4));


c[i * 2] = (char)(b > 9 ? b + 0x37 : b + 0x30);


b = ((byte)(barray[i] & 0xF));


c[i * 2 + 1] = (char)(b > 9 ? b + 0x37 : b + 0x30);


}


return new string(c);


}




Maybe I should update my ExportSqlCe code? - Happy scripting!

SQL Server Compact Toolbox standalone - including all managed DLLs in a single .exe

The latest release of the standalone version of my SQL Server Compact Toolbox, mainly for users that do not have Visual Studio 2010 Pro or higher, is available as a single .exe. It was actually a Tweet from @scottgal, that pointed me towards this excerpt from Jeffery Richters’ CLR via C#, Third Edition.

In order to implement in the WPF application, that is the standalone Toolbox, I added the following code to App.xaml.cs (and a Startup handler to App.xaml):

private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
{
    AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve += (ssender, args) =>
    {
        //string[] names = this.GetType().Assembly.GetManifestResourceNames();

        String resourceName = "ErikEJ.SqlCeToolbox." +
           new AssemblyName(args.Name).Name + ".dll";

        using (var stream = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream(resourceName))
        {
            Byte[] assemblyData = new Byte[stream.Length];
            stream.Read(assemblyData, 0, assemblyData.Length);
            return Assembly.Load(assemblyData);
        }

    }; 
}

I also added all the Managed libraries that the Toolbox uses as Embedded Resources.

I use the following libraries, all from CodePlex:

WPF Property Grid 
http://wpg.codeplex.com/ (for the SqlCeConnectionStringBuilder)
Sample usage

KBCsv 
http://kbcsv.codeplex.com/ (for .csv file import)
Sample usage

SQL Server Compact Scripting Library (for database scripting) 
http://exportsqlce.codeplex.com/
Sample usage Sample usage

FabTab WPF Tab Control (the SQL Editor tabs)
http://fabtab.codeplex.com/
Sample usage

And the Microsoft Data Connection Dialog (to prompt fro a SQL Server Connection) from http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/Connection
Sample usage

Hope you find this tip useful.

New release of Scripting Library and command line utilities–with Schema Diff and DGML from command line

The latest release of my ExportSqlCe SQL Server Compact scripting library and related command line utilities is now available on CodePlex.

This latest version of the command line utilities adds the capability to generate Schema Diff and DGML database graph files.

The schema diff option allows you to compare a SQL Server Compact database file with another SQL Server Compact database file or even a SQL Server database, and creates a script with the required ALTER TABLE etc. statements to synchronize the 2 database schemas.

The DGML option allows you to create a graphical view of the database tables and fields, the resulting .dgml file requires Visual Studio 2010 Premium or higher to be viewed. I blogged about DGML files earlier:

http://erikej.blogspot.com/2010/04/diagram-database-table-relationships.html

http://erikej.blogspot.com/2010/08/sql-server-compact-35-toolbox-updated.html

The latest documentation for the command line utilities is available here.

And both these file types can of course be generated from your own application, using the scripting library. I have some code samples available here.