Tuesday, September 30, 2008
A coworker referenced me to the Sculpture project. The project looks to be a huge time saver for Enterprise Application development. It removes the work of doing things such as the CRUDS through the use of models. "Model your life" or "Get your life back". :)
http://www.codeplex.com/Sculpture
What is Sculpture?
- Sculpture is a .NET open source Model-Driven Development code generation framework ideal for creating and managing .NET Enterprise Applications.
- With Sculpture you can model your application components, and then transform this model to deployable components for your favorite technology.
- Sculpture comes with a host of ready-made Molds (The word "Molds" come from Molding) like (DAAB, NHibernate, LINQ, WCF, ASMX, SQL Server, MYSQL …).
- Sculpture contains a Guidance Package for building your own Mold or customizes existing ones. If you have a custom architecture, using this Guidance Package, you can build a custom code generator with your favorite Technology to fit your needs.
- Sculpture can generate any kind of text output using templates (source code, database scripts, web pages, XML, configuration files, etc.).
- Sculpture raises the level of abstraction, for example the data access layer part in your model may be transformed to NHibernate implementation and with minor changes it can be transformed to LINQ implementation, and in the future can be transformed to "X" framework, which we don't know it now.
I have used XSD.exe countless times to create a class or dataset from an XSD or XML file. It's easy enough to obtain an XSD from a SQL Query, but what about the other direction? What about creating a database FROM an XSD? I found an interesting (old) app that does just that (and quite well). Check it out.
http://xsd2db.sourceforge.net/
Note the example usage is missing the type in the flag. If you are creating sql just set the type to SQL ("-t SQL").
Not sure if this was a good idea on Authorize.NET though…
