August 6th 2008 UPDATE: SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 has shipped: SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Released

Developers looking to get the beta of SP1 for SQL Server Compact can download it from here:

If you install Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta, you'll get the Compact Sp1 as well.  But, if you need the Compact SP1 beta for Visual Studio 2005, or simply can't install the VS 2008 SP1 Beta for some reason, you can download the Compact beta directly.

So, what's in the Compact SP1 Beta?

  • ADO.NET Entity support for SQL Server Compact. In addition to runtime enhancements provided in the Compact runtime, you'll also get Designer support if you download the VS 2008 SP1 Beta.
  • Case Sensitive Collation support
  • Updates for datatypes exposed by SQL Server 2008 to be synchronized with Compact 3.5. We don't have any of these new datatypes in Compact, but sync will map them to equivalent types in Compact.
  • Bug fixes for several query optimizations
  • Additional overload to the SqlCeEngine.Verify() api to include additional consistency checking

Correction (May 15, '08):

The Verify overload was actually added just after SP1.  I forgot that I installed a later build when writing this post. ...so, it's coming, just not in the public SP1

 

System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeEngine eng = new System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeEngine();

eng.Verify(System.Data.SqlServerCe.VerifyOption.Enhanced);

Updates to the Sync Services for ADO.NET runtime, including the ability to leverage the SQL Server 2008 Change Tracking features in the SyncAdapterBuilder

What's not yet in the Beta?

  • Native 64bit support. This will be in the RTM download. It's just not part of the VS SP1 as we didn't ship the 64bit release with VS 2008, and we're trying to hold the rule that we only service bits that were already on the users machine.
  • A bump in our versioning to support private deployment and central deployment.
    • I'll describe this in another post, but essentially developers wanting to privately deploy Sp1 when RTM is installed will fail as both SP1 and RTM have the same version number. Since the GAC always wins, the newer, privately deployed dlls will not load. We've fixed this in a build just after the beta, so this will work when we ship...

When will it ship?
SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 will ship with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008, which is scheduled for later this summer. 

Please post feedback and questions to SQL Server Compact 3.5 MSDN Forum and Synchronization Services for ADO.Net MSDN Forum

For bugs, please post to Microsoft Connect, and be sure to set the product name to SQL Server Compact Edition Repro steps are key.

Steve