[Trend-Bgi]

Hello everybody ,

I am currently exploring technologies in order to create a small "information system" for a printing company in .NET (C# most probably). It won't have difficult Business logic, just a lot of entities. So I want to use an ORM or something alike.

I read a lot about NHibernate and Entity Framework, about which is better, and I tried them.

They are both nice tools, but they still require the developer to do a lot of repetitive tasks that could be automated.

I read somewhere that some people use templates-based code generation tools like CodeSmith to generate their NHibernate mappings, etc. I quickly tried, but it got messy and I threw everything away.

Looking for a "cleaner" alternative, I ran into this software: CodeFluent Entities. It is standalone (i.e. it doesn't work with either NHibernate or EF), and generates a lot of stuff for each entity (and it's model first, i.e. no code to write to get the object model). I found a video tutorial on youtube and tried the soft. So far it's quite nice, but as it does not seem very famous I'd like to know if someone here has ever tried it ?

Thanks in advance,
Regards,

[Trend-Bgi]

Hello, it's me again. Feeling lonely on this thread

Anyway, I finally got a chance to try this CodeFluent Entities thing.

I had to spend some time to get started with the software, but thanks to its youtube channel I got on track pretty easily.

Well it's intresting indeed. It doesn't work with a runtime ORM: the database is generated with its stored procedures. A set of classes are generated to access the stored procedures.

The integration in the .NET UI layers (Windows Forms, Web Forms, WPF) is amazing ! Everything is out of the box, especially databinding, notifypropertychanged, etc...

To give you an idea the generated class for an entity is more 800 hundred lines of code long, and the corresponding collection class is 1100+ lines long.

I saw it's also possible to generate WCF Services, or JSON Services.

It has a website generator. I was able to generate a full website just from my entity/relations model. That's nice, I think I'll make my Back-end with that, I don't need something more sophisticated...

Well bottomline I'm pretty seduced by this software. It took a while to get used to the way it works, but I think I am going to enjoy it. At least more than my Hibernate/EF and CodeSmith combo, for sure.

Regards,
Trend

[dixzy]

Hi Trend,

Actually I use CodeFluent Entities for a while now (almost a year) and the description you've made of this product is right. I've suggested to a lot of people to try it during this year but most of answers I had were "Once again an other ORM"...I think these persons haven't even take look at it.

So I am already seduce by this product and from my point of view one of the greatest thing provided is the code generated. It is really clean and more important platform independent.
I really love developing applications which needs to be available on multiple platforms. Usually it's a pain since you really have to take care of the code you write if you want to reuse it. Thanks to CodeFluent Entities I only need to focus on building my client side using the code it generated for me.

Regarding to UI's producer, it's useful but I'm not using it for anything else than the back-end.

Otherwise, the documentation provided is really complete, all you can need is in. And you don't find your answer in the documentation you may find it or ask for an answer on their forum.


My conclusion, a fantastic tool but only few developers know it. Therefore there is only rare post on public forums about it.


Regards,
Dixzy