NetTiers gets a Wiki (a real one)

One of my more favorite tools is NetTiers. Calling a template a tool might be a stretch but it's my primary reason for using CodeSmith. NetTiers is basically a set of CodeSmith templates that, when pointed at a database, gives you a nicely separated layered set of .NET projects for accessing your data. Basically an auto-generated data access layer. One class for each table in your schema, one property for each column, methods for stored procs, wrappers for accessing aggregates like getting all records (by primary or foreign keys) and other good stuff. I've used it for my data access layer in a few projects and even used the autogenerated website either as a starter for sites or entire sites where all I needed was a set of pages for data maintenance.

Documentation is always a bear for any tool (free or otherwise) and NetTiers is no different. The templates generate 10,000 lines of code, hundreds of classes (depending on how many tables you have) and it's a lot to take in. The forums they have are good but it's hard to find information (even with search) and information quickly becomes out of date without any care and feeding. Wikis can help (but not solve) that by turning to the community for contributions. I'm a firm believer that it's easier to have 10 monkeys write 10 pages than 1 person writing 100 pages of documentation (and we all know who the monkey is here).

So now the NetTiers team has setup real wiki here just for that purpose. Signup for an account and start contributing if that's your thing. This is an improvement over the previous "wiki" they had setup but that effort wasn't quite optimal. The wiki was closed to the public and only contained a handful of canned pages. In any case, the new one is out in the open and ready to go. So if you're a consumer or contributor (or both like me) check it out!