Tonight was a short night of development, as my folks were in town as my dad needed to go to the doctor. I did get some database work done, and my business objects done. I use a hybrid of Rockford Lhotka's CSLA. I don't need all the functionality (such as layers of undo) so I trimmed them back the amount of functionality I needed and created CodeSmith templates to generate my classes. Let me just say I can code really fast now. :) If you haven't taken a look at Lhotka's Business Objects book, I highly recommend taking a look at them. I began using his concepts in VB, and they have proven very reliable and scalable.

QDJ: Do you use ORM's, and if so, what flavor do you like?

I have to admit, I am not the biggest fan of the various ORMs I have tried. They do serve a purpose though, but I have found most inflexible. I am currently using nHibernate, and while they make themselves readily available to code generation, so far, it seems like a lot of code. See my previous comments about another ORM I tried. My brother uses it, and seems to be happy with it. I just thought the learning curve was very steep, and the documentation was very lacking. I took a beating for that opinion. :)

So tonight, I want to post a couple of links I used today. Soon there will be a control for this on the Rubicon Computing site, but until then, I will post them here.

First, I referred to this before, but here's a site with a lot of good links to various "cheat sheets". Some are really good and useful. You can find those here.

Next, I found some neat add-ins for Visual Studio 2008. The first is the Source Code Power Toy. It outlines your code in a treeview, which makes navigating your code, especially in complex classes, very easy. Best of all, it's free! It's available for VS2005 as well.

I also installed the Power Commands for the VS 2008 IDE. It has some useful right-click functionality, such as opening a command prompt, and opening the containing folder, and that's just a small glimpse of what it can do. It seems to be well documented, and I look forward to exploring all it's functionality. And best thing, this one is free too.

I'll probably post some useful CodeSmith templates I created. I love CodeSmith, but sometimes it's tough to find out exactly how to do things, so I will spare the world the trial-and-error where I can. In the current project I am working on, our team saved 1,100+ hours, and over $50,000 dollars last month alone by generating nHibernate code from the templates we created. Yeah, I earned my rate last month for sure. :)