Connector/Net 5.2  Release Notes
------------------------------------

Welcome to the release notes for Connector/Net 5.2

There are a number of new features in this release and most of those new features do 
not come with any change in existing behavior.  However there are a couple of changes 
that users should be aware of.  These changes will be documented in the final GA
documentation.  Please see the changelog for a complete list of new features or bug fixes
found in this release.

Use Old Syntax is now obsolete
==============================
We've had significant feedback from users that they want to use @ to mark their parameters
instead of using the ? character.  very early versions of the provider did use the @ character but
we changed that to ? when we realized that MySQL user variables start with @.  Take the 
following SQL as an example:

SET @myusevar=4;
SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id=@id AND var=@myusevar;

In this SQL @myusevar is a MySQL controlled user variable and @id is intended to be a user-supplied
parameter.  The problem is that the provider cannot tell the difference.  As we wanted to
throw exceptions when parameters are missing upon query execution, we decided to 
use a different parameter marker character and use the Old Syntax configuration option for
applications that were already using @.

Since then we've come to realize that users don't use MySQL user variables very often 
and not using @ makes porting applications from SQL Server to MySQL harder than it needs to be.

Therefore, we have decided to move back to suggesting users use the @ character to mark your 
parameters and we have marked the Use Old Syntax configuration option as obsolete.  If you use
that option in your connection string, it will have zero effect and a warning message will
be logged.  Since we realize that many applications are using ?, we intend to support both 
characters for the foreseeable future.

There are side effects that users should be aware of.  Here is a bullet list of those effects.
- Attempting to add a parameter with the same base name as an existing parameter will throw
  a duplicate parameter exception.  (i.e.  Adding ?id when @id is already in the collection)
- MySqlParameterCollection.IndexOf will return -1 unless the name matches exactly.  
  (i.e.  calling IndexOf("@id") will return -1 even if ?id is in the collection)
- Mixing and matching parameters works though it is not recommended.  You can define your SQL using
  @ (SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id=@id) but then use ? in your paramters.
- There is a new connection string option named 'Allow User Variables'.  The default value is false.
  With the default value, the provider doesn't expect to see any user variables in the SQL therefore
  if it sees @<name> in the SQL it will assume there should be a parameter with the same base name
  and throw an exception if one is not there.  If you intend to use user variables, you have two
  options.  First, continue to use ? for your parameters (not recommended) or 
  set Allow User Variables to true.  With this set to true, the provider will not throw an exception
  if a parameter appears to be missing.
  
TinyInt conversion to Bool is now configurable
==============================================
This change was added to 5.1.5 and pulled forward into this release.  By default, columns 
of type TINYINT(1) are still converted to boolean however that can be disabled
with a new connection string option.  Setting 'Treat Tiny As Boolean' to false will 
return those columns as integer instead of boolean.

Using the new provider schema
=============================
This release includes a completely revamped set of web providers along with a completely
rewritten provider schema.  We will either deliver the SQL scripts in the RTM release
or we will deliver a tool that will allow you to upgrade existing servers to the new
schema.  For this release. the only way to upgrade a given server to the new schema is to
add a configuration option for one of your providers.  The option is 'autogenerateschema'.  
By setting this to true, the provider will silently upgrade the server to the new schema.
Please note that there is no reversing of this procedure so please just do this on test
setups and not on your production systems.

Procedure Parameter schema view has changed
===========================================
With this release we are now supporting using the procedure parameters information
schema view that is available when running against a 6.0 server or later.  The benefits
of this is that you no longer need elevated privileges to pull this collection.

Our provider will use the old code when running against a 5.x server so we modified 
this code to return a collection that matches the 6.0 collection.  This means that we
dropped columns such as IS_RESULT (just check for ordinal position = 0) and 
ROUTINE_TYPE.

We hope you enjoy this release and encourage you to test this release with your applications
and let us know any problems you find.

