I was just reading up on VistaDB and what is coming up next when I stumbled on a weblog entry and discovered Google gears.

It seems I still have to learn more and more before I know a lot, LOL.

However it is quite cool, and I shall play with it over the weekend and post some code here.

Some points of interest for me were:

Native .NET code does not mean that everything that is written in C# or VB .NET will run in Silverlight automatically!, for Silverlight has only a subset of the .NET Framework as its engine to have a smaller footprint.

Google Gears a small add on that can act as a server to cache and serve application resources i.e. HTML,

JavaScript or images. Another features is the database which is accessible like SQLite database system.

You can create and access tables with common SQL commands directly in JavaScript:

var db = google.gears.factory.create('beta.database', '1.0');
var rs = db.execute('SELECT recipe.rowid FROM recipe, recipe_aux ' +' WHERE 
                        recipe.rowid = recipe_aux.rowid AND ' +' 
                        recipe_aux.rating > ? AND 
                        recipe MATCH ?',[3, 'cheese']);
while (rs.isValidRow()) 
{
    console.log(rs.fieldName(0) + " == " + rs.field(0));
    rs.next();
}

rs.close();

All this looks very cool stuff and would surely bring more power to web based applications!

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