Instead of vegging out on TV after work today, I decided to veg out on the web. Between reading and IM I managed to kill about 2 1/2 hours before I even noticed. The payoff for this exercise was discovering a little project called the .NET Action Pack. Rob Conery has taken the concepts of Ruby on Rails and reimplemented them using C# and .NET 2.0. The screencast he used to demonstrate the action pack was quite impressive. With a build provider, a configuration file, and a single assembly, you get a whole host of classes that let you query and manipulate a database however you wish that are available at design time.
I’m definitely going to try this out at work tomorrow.
Interesting. To tie your last two posts together, I’ve started work on a Gentle.Rails assembly that I’m implementing in my current project. Basically, it sits on top of the Gentle framework, with a new MyGeneration template, and does some helpful things.
For example, if I have a User table, and a User object, with the usual FirstName, LastName fields, I can set up a webform with field names like UserFirstName, UserLastName and then just basically do:
rails.FillControl(this, user);
and when I want to save the data:
rails.FillObject(this, user);
There’s still a lot of little things that need fixed, and added to, but now I’m deep into the project and, due to time constraints I haven’t gone through and done any refactoring yet. Plus, the code generator (Gentle.CodeGeneration) object needs to be updated, cleaned up, and added to for creating the actual base front web pages, etc.
You can get everything from the Gentle SVN. I’d love to talk through it and love some help if you or anyone else is interested in helping class it up. I’ve really been holding out too for V2 of Gentle to come out, so I can rebuild the entire thing. 🙂
I’d definitely be interested in exploring your project further. I may have to nag you for some help getting TortoiseSVN configured on my PC at home first.
Heh, piece of cake. Email me and we can set up a time when I’ll be on IM. Like maybe this weekend.
BTW, I contacted Rob at that project. Watched his flash video – pretty dang cool. I’m going to see if I can get involved on his stuff too. Need to understand his ORM a little better, but some of the code that I wrote for Gentle.Rails might be useful to them… as it expands how you can link your UI into the ORM without a lot of code, but customize it over the scaffolds they have now…