Today we’re releasing a CTP refresh for our brand-new 4.0 line. This new version completely replaces the old flat file-based default storage engine with a new one, built with SQL Server CE 4.0. From the outside, everything will work the same.

The rationale behind this decision is very simple: it became too cumbersome for us to maintain two main data storage providers. Using SQL Server CE allows us to use almost the same code for both SQL Server CE and the larger editions of SQL Server. This became particularly important if you consider that we now also have a storage provider for Azure.

You can download the compiled application as well as the source code right from our v4 CTP page. If you’re a dev, don’t forget we have a Mercurial repository at BitBucket.

To build the source code you’ll need to have SQL Server CE installed on your machine (we can’t redistribute the binaries with the source code), but to run the application, you will not need it as it’s set to CopyLocal.

Next up: new search engine based on Lucene.NET.