We're very excited to be announcing that dotNetRDF 1.0.0 has just been released.

It has been just over 4 years now since the project started and since then it has gone from strength to strength becoming the de-facto standard for writing RDF and SPARQL powered applications on the .Net platform. We'd like to say a huge thank you to all our developers and users, especially to everyone who has submitted questions, bugs, suggestions etc over the years which have helped make dotNetRDF what it is today.

Downloads

As usual get the binaries by going to Download dotNetRDF and the source by going to Download dotNetRDF Source, you can also get the latest toolkit by going to Download dotNetRDF Toolkit for Windows.

Changes

This is primarily a stability release which fixes many bugs reported with 0.9.0 RC4 particularly in our SPARQL engine but also in our parser sub-systems. This release does contain a few minor features as follows:

• New instance mode for simplified Configuration API usage
• Updated Turtle W3C parser support to the latest W3C Candidate Recommendation (Feb 19th 2013 version)
• New ReadWriteSparqlConnector for connecting to arbitrary SPARQL capable stores which have both a query and update endpoint available
• New optimization which improves performance for some ORDER BY + DISTINCT queries
• Greatly improved rdfServer and rdfServerGui tools

This release also updates our dependencies to the latest and greatest versions which also helps fix some previously reported bugs which could cause poor performance and spurious exceptions to be thrown under the VS debugger.

Tags: 1.0.0, dotNetRDF, Download, Downloads, Library, Release, Stable, Turtle, W3C

A number of users have independently reported experiencing a NullReferenceException when doing something as simple as the following:

Graph g = new Graph();

Obviously this is a bit disconcerting for users but here's the interesting thing, this error is actually intentional and doesn't affect function. The actual source of the error is a data structure in one of our dependencies which determines whether it supports null keys by invoking a function on null, if a NullReferenceException is thrown then it disables null keys.

You can safely click Continue on the debugger report of this error, the slight complication is that each graph contains 4-7 of these data structures so this error will show up a whole bunch of times depending on your code.

CORE-292 contains the original report and discussion of this issue. The analysis found that this is a harmless error as explained above and that it will only show up when running under the VS debugger. The bizarre thing is that with 0.8.2 VS would report the error as unhandled even when the external library was handling this. The resolution we made in 0.9.0 was to include the PDBs in our packages which meant that the debugger was able to correctly identify that the error was handled which makes it go away most of the time.

However this error can still show up with 0.9.0 if you have Debug > Exceptions > Break on Thrown set for CLR exceptions or if you don't have the PDBs in your environment will show up anyway.

CORE-317 tracks the recent work that has happened to change the external library to make null key handling an explicit configuration argument rather than a auto-detection. This eliminates the error entirely in our latest builds so this will be fully resolved in 1.0.0

In the meantime rest assured that the error is harmless and can be safely ignored.

Tags: 0.8.2, 0.9.0, dotNetRDF, NullReferenceException

We've been busy porting our User Guide and Developer Guide onto our BitBucket Wiki.

You will find that existing documentation links on the website here now redirect over to the wiki where that content has been ported. We will be continuing to move content in the coming weeks so some things will still be found here in the meantime. Eventually the plan is for the website to just be an entry point for users providing links to downloads, external documentation and resources with the bulk of our content living elsewhere.

The BitBucket platform makes it much easier to author and maintain our documentation and should allow us to keep the documentation much more up to date in the future. One of the features of our new documentation is a brand new How To section which contains quick guides for completing common tasks.

If you have suggestions for areas where you still find our documentation lacking please let us know via our Contact Us page.

Tags: BitBucket, Developer Guide, Developers, Documentation, Extension, User Guide, Wiki

We are pleased to announce the release of dotNetRDF 0.9.0 RC 4, you get get it now by going to Download dotNetRDF or get the source code by going to Download dotNetRDF Source

This is primarily a maintenance and bug fix release which fixes a variety of issues reported with the previous release and fixes some corner case SPARQL 1.1 bugs. It is intended to be a final release candidate before a stable 1.0.0 release so we would appreciate as much feedback as you are able to give.

We intend to make a stable 1.0.0 release in the next couple of months barring any major bugs being discovered.

As always thanks to everyone in the community who has contributed feedback bug reports and patches and to all our developers for their continued effort.

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So it's taken me a bit longer than usual to get round to writing this post but dotNetRDF 0.8.2 was released just over a week ago now. You can get it now by going to Download dotNetRDF

0.8.2 is a Release Candidate for a stable 1.0.0 so is primarily a bug fix and hardening release. In terms of feature changes there is nothing user visible though various things have been enhanced to be more performant.

Feature wise the key thing for this release is that we have once again realigned with the latest versions of the SPARQL specification and are now 100% compliant with the Query, Update, Federated Query and Service Description specifications. We aim to report 100% compliance for the remaining specifications we implement - SPARQL Protocol and Graph Store Protocol - by 1.0.0.

This release includes the following bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug in the BNODE() function
• Fixed a bug in Extend that could occur when many Extends were nested together
• Fixed an intermittent race condition in the implementation of parallel Left Join
• Fixed a bug in the evaluation of some complex GROUP BY statements
• Fixed a bug in the string representation of CountDistinctAggregate
• Fixed a bug related to losing FILTERS when building queries using the internal APIs
• Fixed a bug related to ToString() form of some API built queries
• Fixed a bug related to graph scoping of full text search
• Fixes various bugs related to SPARQL 1.1 Protocol and Service Description compliance

Performance

0.8.x marks the culmination of a series of improvements to our SPARQL engine which provide much better performance and scalability. The following graph illustrates the difference between 0.6.0 and 0.8.2, note that some of these improvements have been available as experimental options in the 0.7.x releases but this is the first release in which all are available together and on by default. As can be seen in the graph performance is much better and scales exceptionally with dataset size:

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We're please to announce the availability of dotNetRDF 0.7.2 Beta, this is a minor feature and bug fix release and can be downloaded by going to Download dotNetRDF. Full source code is available via Download dotNetRDF Source or from our Mercurial Repository.

You can also now get Version 0.6.2 Beta of our Toolkit by going to Download dotNetRDF Toolkit for Windows or an installable version from Download dotNetRDF Toolkit Installer

Bug Fixes

As ever there are a variety of bug fixes for both minor and serious bugs in this release, thanks to everyone in the community who reported or helped to fix bugs.

Core API

We've changed the internal storage of triples to a new data structure which should boost performance a little and slightly reduce memory usage though effects may differ depending on your data. We've also continued the deprecation and removal of defunct code.

Dependencies

We've updated our 3rd party dependencies to their latest versions where possible, our NuGet packages are now using NuGet dependencies rather than shipping DLLs where possible.

Configuration API

The Configuration API has received a number of fixes and improvements, including more auto-configuration capabilities and helper methods for loading in Configuration Graphs.

Parsing

Improves support for Turtle 1.1 to be near 100% compliant

SPARQL

SPARQL 1.1 support has been updated to be near 100% compliant with the latest specification (98-99% compliant).

We've also introduced some new abstractions into the SPARQL engine to allow for future extensions, this release is the first to support using the + and - operators for date time arithmetic.

Storage

IStorageServer implementations are now separate classes, the parent server of a IStorageProvider may be obtained (where available) from the new ParentServer property.

Source Code

In case you haven't noticed we've moved to Mercurial for source control, you can now find our latest sources in our Mercurial Repository

Tags: 0.7.2, API, Beta, Configuration API, dotNetRDF, Downloads, Mercurial, Releases, SPARQL, Turtle

We're pleased to announce that Khalil Ahmed and Graham Moore of Networked Planet recently joined the project. Both Kal and Graham have been contributing ideas, bug fixes and testing to the project for some time.

They are also the developers behind BrightstarDB a .Net triple store built on top of dotNetRDF

Tags: Brightstar, BrightstarDB, Contributors, Developers, Graham, Graham Moore, Kal, Khalil Ahmed

We're pleased to announce the release of dotNetRDF 0.7.1 Beta and the associated dotNetRDF Toolkit 0.6.1 Beta release. As always you can get these by going to Download dotNetRDF or get the source by going to Download dotNetRDF Source, Toolkit downloads can be found on the Tools page.

This release is primarily a minor feature and bug fix releases, it fixes several key bugs reported by our users:

• URI encoding may not always be correctly preserved - thanks to Rob Styles
• Some valid language specifiers are rejected by the parser - thanks to Csaba Gonczi
• GraphDiff throws errors when passed null references
• rdfEditor can lose data/crash when using Close All or Exiting with unsaved changes and attempting to Cancel - Tomasz Pluskiewicz

This release also includes more API clean up such as obsoleting more code slated for removal, removing unnecessary overloads and tweaking some recently introduced APIs like IStorageServer. This API is now fully implemented by our Sesame, AllegroGraph and Stardog connectors so you can now create, list and access all the stores available from those systems via our API.

Store Manager has been updated to fully support these features and with some other minor aesthetic fixes.

As always thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, see the Acknowledgements file included in the distribution for a full list of acknowledgements.

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Hot on the heels of the recent core library release we've just released the latest version of our Tools package - get it now by going to Download dotNetRDF Toolkit for Windows or Download dotNetRDF Toolkit Installer

This release picks up many of the improvements in the core library and primarily provides some major feature enhancements to our Store Manager tool. The Store Manager now allows you to create new connections by editing existing connections and provides preliminary support for our some of the new capabilities in the Storage API like providing lists of available stores when communicating with systems like Sesame which provide access to multiple stores.

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We're pleased to announce the release of dotNetRDF 0.7.0 - you can get it now by going to Download dotNetRDF or get the full source by going to Download dotNetRDF Source

This is a major release which includes some important enhancements and breaking changes in the library. Please read on for a summary of the changes....

Obsolete API Removal

We've removed a couple of obsolete APIs in the 0.7.0 release, namely the long superceded ISelector API and the rarely used Node Collection API. Also as previously publicized we are now officially marking the Data.Sql library as deprecated since we do not intend to continue supporting it past the 0.7.x releases.

Storage API Refactor

We've made major changes to the Storage API, as well as introducing all new APIs for asynchronous storage (IAsyncStorageProvider, IAsyncQueryableStorage and IAsyncUpdateableStorage) we've also renamed the existing APIs to align with these names. The name changes are summarized as follows:

• IGenericIOManager -> IStorageProvider
• IQueryableGenericIOManager -> IQueryableStorage
• IUpdateableGenericIOManager -> IUpdateableStorage
• IMultiStoreGenericIOManager ->IStorageServer

We hope you'll appreciate the more descriptive names and we've also made sure that existing code won't immediately break since the old names are preserved as marker interfaces extended their new equivalents. We have marked the old names as obsolete so you will start seeing compiler warnings reminding you to upgrade your code to the new APIs.

We think you'll find the new asynchronous storage API very useful and this will allow you to use many of the supported stores on platforms like Windows Phone 7 where they were previously unavailable.

SPARQL 1.1

We've updated our SPARQL 1.1 support to be as close to the latest editors draft as possible but please note as stated in the Known Issues there are still some grey areas and a lack of official tests for some new features so we are not guaranteeing full SPARQL compliance in this release.

SPARQL Default Graph Behaviour

We've changed our default behaviour around SPARQL queries so that the default graph is not automatically the union graph when no default is explicitly set. This may have an impact on the results of your SPARQL query so if you were relying on this feature either instantiate your ISparqlDataset instances such that you specify union default graph as true or refactor your queries so they explicitly specify the graphs to query over.

IStoreReader/IStoreWriter API refactor

The IStoreWriter and IStoreReader APIs have been refactored to align with the IRdfReader and IRdfWriter interfaces. You no longer need to work with IStorageParams instances in order to use these interfaces which makes them much more user friendly.

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