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Reviewing Active Writer (Preview)
Active Writer is a DSL to design / generate Active Record classes. It is still a preview, but I have to say that after I played with it a bit, I am very impressed. Not stoned cold stunned, mind you, but the potential is definately there.
I just emailed Gokhan my detailed impressions, and my #1 complaint was "I can do bulk data entry with this easily". When such a techincal product gets to the point that accessibility issue is the first thing that comes to mind, I know that quite a bit of work was invested in it.
The designer surface allows you to define your entities and the assoications between them very easily. I found that I almost uncounciously started to design a very complex object graph and was annoyed that I couldn't find the ManyToAny association (which is probably one of the more obsucre ones in NHibernate). The fact that it took me 15 minutes to get to this point says quite a lot. It took me about two months to get to that point when I designed my project using code & Management Studio.
The attention to detail and the amount of knowledge invested in this is very high. To give you a minor point, if you try to save an invalid model, it will warn you and put the validation errors in the Error List, where a double click will take you to the offending collection/entity. Or the grouping for the properties required to define the details of the assoications which make it very easy to work with them, and many other things that just gives the feeling of spit & polish.
It doesn't support generic assoications (since that was added about a week ago or less), and doesn't inherit from ActiveRecordBase<T> and that is the biggest complaint I have about the code it generates, actually.
Very promising.
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