I went back to SubSonic website just to check what is new and I was happy to see the 3.0 release. Just downloaded and started to play around with it. Also, this week while i was reading again my favorite book on Data Binding - "Data binding with Windows Forms 2.0" by Brian Noyce I thought I can just try the code I am writing with new shiney SubSonic 3.0!

ActiveRecord looks nice but i was thrilled to see the SimpleRepository Screencast and could not help writing a small application using it. It is quite flexible as far as selecting a Database is concerned. I have used SubSonic 2.x earlier and i liked it, after playing around for a couple of hours i felt what would i do without it.

And as Rob Conery said “A SimpleRepository which is just about zero-drag and even builds your database for you” and i was amazed to see it really does all that is promised!. Though the release has a few bugs when i was writing my demo application but i could see on GitHub other people discussing those bugs and proposing fixes.

Here you can download the demo application i wrote which shows some data binding concepts and how to go about using SubSonic SimpleRepository in a Forms application. Hope you find it informative.

But as Rob discussed in another post if SubSonic is a toy or a tool for serious development i would say i did use SubSonic 2.x in more than 4 projects which are in production now and I had far less bug reports where data access is concerned. And i hope to do better with SubSonic 3.x.

Let use see what comes next :)

SubSonic is a great tool and makes it really easy to work with data access and is easy to configure as well. But a major problem that I faced was moving from development to production and then non technical people sometimes have to open and modify the *.config file all the time to change the configuration for subsonic service section in the web.config or app.config. And the support becomes a nightmare for this trivial thing.

Interestingly, there is a way around it that i discovered a few days back. Here is the code snippet to do that:

private static bool _bIsInitialized = false;

private void InitSubsonic()
{
  if (_bIsInitialized)
    return;
                
  DataService.Providers = new DataProviderCollection();
  
  // here you can get settings from anywhere and make up a connection string :)
  CustomDataProvider provider = new CustomDataProvider("Data Source=(local); Database="WebShop"));
  DataService.Providers.Add(provider);
  DataService.Provider = provider;

  _bIsInitialized = true;
            
}

// Here it is MySql that i needed but you
// may have any provider supported by SubSonic
private class CustomDataProvider : MySqlDataProvider
{
  public CustomDataProvider(string connectionString)
  {
    DefaultConnectionString = connectionString;
  }

  public override string Name 
  {
       get 
       {
              return "WebShop"; // Database Name does not change often!!
        }
   } 
}

And i just called the InitSubsonic method in the Form_Load event handler (it was a windows app). And it just worked!!!

I hope a few developers find this trick useful!!!

Often we need an easy to use DAL generator but then it entails using Entity Framework, optionally LINQ to be able to be productive quickly. However, for small applications, it is much of an overhead and especially if you need to deploy it to end users who would not want to install .NET 3.5 runtime just for a small application. VistaDB has solved the problem for a scalable small footprint database and people are picking it up for use more and more. Even this blog uses the express edition of VistaDB.

I came across  CoolStorage.NET and it really is superb. I could put together a small web application in less than two hours using it. The best part is it does not generate any code but allows you to extend the logic you would want in your mapped classes by the magic of partial classes. I find it quite lightweight and easy to use. I have used SubSonic but I definitely liked this one better. The documentation though not complete, is quite good to start with and anyone with basic working knowledge in .NET should be able to pick up.

Cheers to guys at Activa