I wanted to do a tech.ed talk on ESE but it was rejected....ah, what might have been.
Ah! The pillocks. Anyway, I've read the samples, some of the source code and some of the documentation and I think they CodePlex team have done a really neat job on wrapping esent.dll in a friendly way that has a nice .NET coding style. You can "quick start" with the generic dictionary which has ESE as the backing store, or you can use the Api.XXX methods and disposable class wrappers. I can see now that ESE is a rather classical ISAM implementation. You have familiar tables and columns with indexes and you can search EQ, GE or LE and read sequentially, but not much more than that. It really takes me back to mainframe ISAM (and VSAM) files, which in their day were pretty powerful and we built a lot of gigantic applications over them. I remember going to a database conference in 1986 and the hot subject was this new fangled thing called relational databases. I am quite sure that I will use managed ESENT in real apps quite soon. Like UDP and T4, I reckon it's one of those hidden gems. Greg
