Kickstarter.net

Recently I've been trialling a product called Kickstarter [ Kickstarter website ] with a view to using it for:

• Stored Procudure generation
• Data Access Layer code generation
• Business Objects code generation
• Web Forms Creation

As its name suggests, Kickstarter is designed to produce the mundane, robotic parts of the application such as the CRUD elements (forms, sprocs and classes to Create, Retreive, Update and Delete database entities). For even a small application these simple tasks can consume days - or weeks - worth of time.

Briefly, here are the steps to create a new project...

• Step 1 – Configure data source
• Step 2 – Create CRUD stored procedures
• Step 3 – Define which tables will have List Edit items created for them
• Step 4 – Set project attributes such as namespace, language (C#, VB) etc.
• Step 5 – Generate and customize as many WebForms as you wish
• Step 6 – Save Kickstarter project file (saves project metadata as Xml file)
• Step 7 – Generate source files
• Step 8 – Open Visual Studio Project and begin customization.

Although the files that are produced by the application are not highly configurable, the UI portion (WebForm) can be read dynamically from template files. I had very little difficulty in customizing the output for my own needs... this included a Intranet and Internet application that both had DHTML sections (menus) and used UserControls for the Header, Footer, Side etc. I even managed to swap the code that the generator produced for the datagrids with a custom control (derived from DataGrid) that I had created.

I found the product - and the support - to be excellent and I would highly recommend this product to anyone that doesn't currently have a tool for this purpose.

Oh yeh... here's a quick tip - it's not expensive either ;-)

Link Of The Day:
DHTML Applications

Cya...

Try
    For Each item In RTFM.Toc
        If item.Answers( "question" ) Then
            knowledgeItem = User.Read( item )
            If Not( User.Understands(knowledgeItem ) ) Then
                User.RequestInformation( "ASPFriends", knowledgeItem )
            End If
        End If
    Next
Catch ex As UserDidntSpendTimeLookingException
    Slap( User )
End Try