Youch!!

The muse came and bit me really hard the other day.

I think I must have been thinking of 6 things at once, when all of a sudden all these things got jumbled together and started joining up. I was thinking of something like this:

1. Bill Vaughn's presentation at DevDays about data access in Smart Client applications
2. Rory Blyth's general bias against Datasets (I'd link to something specific, but I can't remember exactly where I heard it
3. This Episode of DotNetRocks with Scott Hanselman talking about code generation
4. A conversation I was having with a friend of mine about how it's quite dull and boring essentially building a data model in SQL Server, and then translating that into a set of .NET classes to use in an app

You can probably see where this is going...

I've decided to see if I can write a little app that automatically generates classes from a SQL Server database. As I see it, it'll go through the DB, convert all the tables to classes. Sounds simple. And it will be. It won't be a giant multi-functioned fully fuctional code-generation app with accompanying syntax and stuff. It'll just be something I use to create classes after I've built a DB. I always prefer building a DB to model my data to doing it just in code. It's probably just me and the way I think. I've been working with databases longer than I've been writing .NET, so I just find it easier to conceptualise it this way.

The key things my little script will do are:

• Generate interfaces for each object
• Create abstract classes that implement each interface
• Generate either dynamic SQL or a stored procedure on the server to handle data access

So that's that.

As I go along, I'll expand a bit more. But it's quite fun at the moment.