Visual Studio 2017 is starting to be available (although not quite a public release yet), so some of you might be wondering when VistaDB's VS Designer tools (and EF) will support VS 2017.

If you just need to code and build a project referencing VistaDB then it should already work in VS 2017 with any existing releases of VistaDB, and external tools like Data Builder can of course be used regardless of what version of Visual Studio you use.  We believe general Entity Framework usage such as EF6 will also work with existing versions--including the "model first" approach with a model that is hand-edited or created from a SQL Server database and swapping in VistaDB as an alternative provider.

Support for the VS Designer tools features within Visual Studio 2017 will likely require an update to our VS Designer plug-in and will not work with existing releases.  The EDMX designer will also presumably be affected and would not be able to import or update schema from a VistaDB database in VS 2017 with existing releases.  We'll put out a new release version with this updated support for VS 2017 when we can.  If you urgently need this support, contact VistaDB Support for a preview build.

Be warned, we're hearing indications that supporting VS 2017 may mean that we finally have to drop support for VS 2010.  This will still leave support for the most recent several versions (2012, 2013, 2015, and--going forward---2017).  Hopefully, you've all long since moved on from VS 2010 to a newer one, but if not...  VS 2010 projects should still be able to build against older and newer versions of the VistaDB engine library; only the integrated VS tooling support would be lost going forward.

UPDATE: VS 2017 support is now available in Release 5.6 (version 5.6.8).

Release 5.6 (version 5.6.8) is now available with Visual Studio 2017 support.

For those who had the 5.6.6 beta version there are a few additional fixes in 5.6.8 (mostly in the Samples & Unit Tests), so you may want to update to the proper release at some point, but there's no particular rush.

Good news and bad news - the bad news is that you're right, we didn't make our goal to ship by the end of May.  The good news is if you contact Support they'll send you a download link for the extension.  We're just waiting on a fix to be completed to roll in with this new extension to call it VistaDB 5.6.  We had to actually create an entirely separate extension and it isn't as well integrated with the installation as I'd like.  We're looking to see if there's anything else we can do to help with that and if not then we'll release it as it is right now. 

As an update for this; the installation method for extensions in VS 2017 is so completely changed that we are likely going to have to rewrite parts of our extensibility to do it.  For VS 2010->2015 the installation method was pretty similar and we could find common baseline ways to install the same code into all of them, for all users.

VS 2017 supports multiple local installations which changes all the rules; in particular since we use a relatively old extensibility capability (DDEX) which is unique to data providers our installation options are challenging.  We're continuing to work on the problem to see how we can solve it while maintaining backwards compatibility with prior version of Visual Studio as well.

We are planning on this being available by the end of the month.  It's taken a bit longer than we'd like due to changes in VS 2017.