General Actions:
Last modified on August 15, 2012 17:21
DevForce installed tools, templates, and other artifacts on your development machine. This topic tells you what they are and what they do.
You'll want to update DevForce as new releases become available. We'll give you some tips to make that process as smooth as possible.
DevForce on the Start Menu
Open the "Windows Start Menu | All Programs" and scroll to the "DevForce 2010 ..." folder. That folder name is suffixed with the version number of your currently installed DevForce copy - a useful fact when communicating with our Support team.
The following image depicts the items in the DevForce menu:
| Item | Summary |
|---|---|
| Getting Started | A welcoming web page that suggests some ways to get going. |
| API Documentation | A help file detailing the DevForce library APIs. Also available online. |
| DevForce Resource Center | The online documentation that you're reading right now. |
| Installation Guide | The online guide to installing DevForce. It covers the installation and upgrade process in detail and also contains a troubleshooting section. |
| Release Notes | Important information online about the current release including special upgrade instructions, breaking changes, feature enhancements and bug fixes. It also holds release notes for previous versions which may help you catch up if you're a few releases back. |
| Configuration Editor | A visual configuration tool for editing the DevForce-related sections of the web.config and the app.config. |
| Database Installer | Installs the NorthwindIB tutorial database used by most of the DevForce code samples. See below. |
| N-Tier Configuration Starter | A simple tool for testing a distributed .NET client application on a local developer machine. Useful for n-tier WPF or Windows Forms applications, but not Silverlight application. app. Creates folders for client- and server-side assemblies, modifies configuration files, and facilitates running the DevForce EntityService in a separate process from the client side application. |
| Product Key Updater | Use to replace your current (perhaps temporary) product key with a new one. |
| Trace Viewer | Tool for listening to activity log messages published by a running DevForce application. |
Upgrading your copy of DevForce
New versions of DevForce are released approximately every six weeks. The changes are typically small and incremental.
Always read the Release Notes. They are packed with information about new enhancements and bug fixes. Breaking changes are sometimes necessary. We list those first, telling you why they were necessary and what you can do to identify any impacts and adapt your existing code.
The NorthwindIB database
NorthwindIB is the canonical sample database used by DevForce code samples, some reference implementations, and throughout the documentation. It derives from the Microsoft NorthwindEF database although it differs in several significant respects. For example, the Customer table uses a GUID key instead of a character key and we added several new tables to demonstrate a variety of inheritance and modeling scenarios.
We do change NorthwindIB occasionally in order to support new example code that illustrates DevForce features.
We recommend that you re-install the latest copy of "NorthwindIB" so you can follow along.
The normal installation process tries to add this to your SQL Server databases but it may fail for any number of reasons. The "Database Installer" tool may overcome those obstacles. You can always try to manually attach the NorthwindIB files (.mdf and _log.ldf) which are in the directory where you installed DevForce. Please see the Installation Guide for more details.