*Quick Update*
.netSavant is no longer. I’m leaving this page up for now, but eventually it will be taken down. Thanks for your support, I hope to have some new project to share some time soon!
A Brief History of Laziness
I’ve been a visual studio .net extensibility nerd since the IDE was released to the Microsoft developer network way back in 2001. Maybe it was the challenge of doing something that no one else I knew was doing, though more than likely it just boils down to the fact that I’m inherently lazy when it comes to writing certain types of code; Specifically anything having to do with ADO.NET.
After all these years I finally poured myself into my own addin for public release, .netSavant.
The Rant
.netSavant is for those of us who like to write optimized database access code but don’t want to write the ADO.NET code that goes along with it. You could use a big fancy ORM framework to write and hook up your database to your application. Unfortunately you end up trading one type of programming for another and sacrificing performance and long term supportability in the process. Many of these systems either auto generate unsupportable code or rely on xml configuration files, neither approach lending necessarily to performance or long term supportability.
Personally, I am not a fan of ORM systems. I suppose they can help you get your app up and running faster, but at what cost? Over the years I’ve heard ”I’ll worry about performance later” from so many programmers that it makes me ill. Those poor “worry about it later” guys usually find out far too late that their performance issue is due to poor software design rather than improper implementation or a “magic 10 lines of code” that can be refactored without trouble.
Usually these are the same poor souls who think that all performance problems can be solved with caching, and that RAM is an infinate resource.
Anyway, I can go on and on about designing software with performance in mind.
What is .netSavant?
To sum it up; .netSavant generates the highly optimized ADO.NET code that you’d normally like to write by hand by using an intuitive drag and drop interface. No impossible to debug and optimize framework to deal with. No crazy configuration bells and whistles. We’re talkin down and dirty optimized raw ADO.NET code.
.netSavant uses the adapter design pattern to encapsulate the call to a stored procedure with a nice friendly object. Need to use inline SQL because you’re integrating with a third party database that you can’t create stored procedures in? No problem, .netSavant handles inline SQL by using parameterized SQL statements that you write and manage.
Stop by the website, download a copy and give it a whirl. I’m sure the approach that I take with the design of the generated code will take you some getting used to, mostly because it is so deceptively simple.
Enjoy!
May 25, 2008 at 4:46 AM |
Any idea when the website (www.dotnetsavant.com) will be up? I’m very interested in your add-in as I’ve been meaning to write something like this for some time, but haven’t been able to find the time.
Thanks.
May 25, 2008 at 2:23 PM |
Hey Michael,
I’ve been working to finish the ecommerce portion of the website. Its been a bit of a struggle unfortunately with some unforeseen issues that I’ve had to address. I’m “hoping” to have it done within the next week, so we’ll see how the next few days go. I might launch the website, with the eCommerce stuff following a bit later in the week as well. With a 30 day free trial I dont know that anyone will even purchase it before the trial period is up.
Thanks a ton for your interest
Joshua