Hi Greg, I'm in a similar position; I have a suite of "My Generation" templates for CRUD + UI development, but "My Generation" is getting long in the tooth, doesn't play well in newer versions of Windows, and seems to be dying a long and slow death. There is CodeSmith Generator, but it's more than I'm willing to pay for a stand-alone code generation tool that I only use from time to time.
I started to move some of my templates to T4, and while it's nice that it's all in Visual Studio, it feels like a distinct step backwards from My Generation and there's no real way to manage metadata. I've been writing a script that connects to a database, and exports all of the metadata as an XML file, so I can manage it with any XML editor. I'm using F# for this, and Type-Providers make it so easy (compared to C# anyway). I'm then undecided on which technology to use to generate actual code from that meta-data. I like MVC + razor as a rendering engine, but I'm not sure how well this would fly outside of the web. Or I could use T4. Perhaps I could work with an open-source tool like Moustache. Or I could write a custom-code solution. I'm yet to decide. On 6 November 2014 09:28, Greg Keogh <g...@mira.net> wrote: > Folks, I have a SQL Server Express 2008 database with about 20 tables with > neat relationships and I'd like to have a desktop utility to maintain the > tables. I just want to list, edit, create and delete rows. A few years ago > I was faced with a similar situation and I used T4 templates to spit out > WPF controls, dialogs, grids and code behinds, which worked great (and I'm > still using the app). Rather than do that sort of thing again I thought it > was worth asking for suggestions about new tools or techniques that might > make a cruddy UI over some tables. > > *Greg K* >
