I've just released another sample for the Database Explorer API, this time using the built in features of Visual Studio 2008 (should work with VS 2005 with a download of the SDK). Visual Studio 2008 comes with a built in code generator known as T4. While the built in editing experience leaves a bit to be desired the free T4 editor by Clarius Consulting goes a long way to making it workable. If you download the editor, it indicates that the time bomb expires in Jan 1, 2008; this however isn't the case as they're still working on the next release.

This sample creates a fairly decent (not perfect by any means) set of entities which you can then easily drop on to a class designer and get a good feel for how your domain model looks. It has support for all but the recursive relationship type, which could be added as the API does support this. This sample is provided to show how much you can do with both T4 and the API in only a small amout of code. I've included a screen shot from the Adventure Works sample, which as you can see supports many relationship types. The sample download includes the results run against the AdventureWorks sample database.

To download the new sample visit the projects CodePlex page.

Remember to provide as much feed back on the samples and API as you can. Enjoy!

I'm in the process of getting up to speed with DSL tools, and while there's a whole lot of info out there, at the end of a long day I'd prefer to watch a video on a new subject rather than pour over the written docs, but trying to locate all the video's can be difficult, and even more if you want to view them in the right order. Well this is my effort to make things a little easier. Unless otherwise stated these videos's relate to Visual Studio 2008 edition of DSL tools, as I discover more DSL video's I'll add them to the list. If you know of a good one I've missed, leave a comment and I'll get it added. More...

While I don't normally get involved with deploying web applications (we normally have 'people' for that) however I did have to deploy the application you're using now. Which brings me to the blog post I recently found which discusses the top 10 best practices for ASP.NET which I've linked to on my toolbox page. The main one that concerned was of concern to me was forgetting to switch off debug mode.

   1: <system.web>

   2:   <compilation debug="false" />

   3: </system.web>

This setting appears to have a large impact on production web sites so I'd check out the detail in the this post to get all the details. Also you might want to check the config files of the production apps you work on or blog if you host your own; lets just say we may need to update a few of ours!

I went along to the .NET developers association in Redmond on Monday where Ken Levy demonstrated the extensibility tools of VS.NET 2008 (which also relates to VS 2005 to some extent). It seems that MS have decided to offer the VS 2008 shell license free! If you're anyone who's looking at providing third party tools (related or not to Visual Studio) and need a good IDE host, you've just saved yourself a bucket load of time. Also, it runs in two modes, integrated (merges with your instance of VS 2008) or isolated where it acts as its own (customisable too I was led to believe) IDE without the need for VS 2008. More...