Comments on: January MSDN Toolbox Column Online

By: Marc Fields

Marc Fields — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:46:44 +0000

Theres been a pretty big explosion in the ORM/data tier space lately, loads of code generators of course, but one standout for us was Diamond Binding. Pretty cool mix of minimal code generation (definitions only), an NHibernate backend (damn fast!), and some pretty slick Visual Studio integration. Takes you from a database schema to a complete data layer in a couple of clicks, and then has CI features to keep up to date – without blowing away your code.

Theyve got a free version, but are pretty relaxed about the licensing. The rep we spoke to just said “Try it out, get a license before you ship.” – free version has all the features, just non commercial use only.

Using Diamond Binding with the new UI frameworks from Microsoft seems to slash the amount of effort in making apps. 2008 is going to be a good year for developers

By: kevin

kevin — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:03:54 +0000

great stuff!

I wonder if an entire article on ruby/rails stuff from your 22books experience would fly ;P

Beyond Subsonic in my open source/freeware tool box, I also make use of UrlRewriting, RssToolkit, ValEverywhere, CipherLite, Markdown and I use to rely on lognet but now I just have my own little logging utility.

By: Duane Fields

Duane Fields — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:42:03 +0000

Two more useful tools from Exact Magic Software that I would add to the list. StudioTools is free and has Code Metrics and navigation tools, while TestMatrix adds unit testing to Visual Studio. TestMatrix currently supports nUnit, MbUnit, and csUnit.