.NET Code Generators (2)

Unfortunately the project requiring a code generator went on hold! But, I did manage to try out Deklarit before this happened. Deklarit seems like a very sexy piece of software, but unfortunately it just didn't do the business for me. I was most upset about it wanting me to use certain naming conventions so that it could derive relationships between entities using thier field names.

On one side there is a beautiful simplicity to this approach in that less meta information has to be maintained. On the other side, I think the Deklarit team have created an unnatural dependency between to orthagonal issues. This has made working with legacy schemas a pain in the rear! I do know that Deklarit offer a reasonable approach to circumnavigating this problem, but to be honest I didn't have time to understand it. Furthermore, I had other problems too, and couldn't work out if they were down to me being a muppet or problems with the tool. Probably the former. To be fair, there are lots of great things said about Deklarit (clarity in documentation, snazzy look and feel, clever schema migration etc), and perhaps I'll try it again in the future.

In my virtual travels I still keep hearing good things about LLBLGEN Pro. Many people seem to love this tool, and I'm definately going to give it a trial. I'll admit that I have installed it already, but not used it. That said, I did read some of help documentation, and this alone worth the install without even loading the program up! I spoke to one guy who said this:




I conducted a very detailed research looking for a powerful, easy to use, flexible, configurable and near perfect data layer. I compared the following -



1. Wilson OR Mapper

2. Entity-Broker

3. LLBL Gen Pro

4. Custom code generation template



Of all I ended up selecting LLBL Gen Pro. This is the only one that is easy to use, comes with amazing support and documentation and is configurable to support a lot of corner cases, like supporting an ASP hosting with multiple database instances with similar schema; changing connection string at run time; providing complex joins for views, drop downs etc right as part of the application design. The learning curve is a about a week but worth the buck!!



My second favourite is the Wilson OR Mapper but they need to improve the following

- documentation

- cover corner cases for real projects with decently large budgets

- prepare the code generation wizard to handle more than simple OR Mapping between directly related tables; provide the concept of LLBL Gen Pro's TypedList.