posted on Monday, December 17, 2007 9:27 PM by thomasswilliams

OT: Merry Christmas and Blog Stats 2007 Edition

Merry Christmas to all my reader(s). I hope you have a great Christmas and New Year, and I’ll see you in January!

I thought it would be fitting to wrap up 2007 with a quick summary of my blog statistics, below.

Number of posts for the year: 31 (plus this one, equals 32)

3 Most Viewed Posts According to Web and Aggregate View Stats - probably because they're the oldest

3 Most Commented Posts

Book Reviews

My Favorite 4 Posts - I had something to say, or I put a lot of effort in and was happy with the results, or something impacted me

Examples of Code I Wrote - my feeble contribution :-)

Tags: christmas, statistics, blog

Comments

# re: OT: Merry Christmas and Blog Stats 2007 Edition @ Thursday, December 20, 2007 9:03 PM

Hi Thomas,

I am a director of an Austalian ISV (Dunn & Churchill) for the .Net ecosystem focusing on development tools and libraries. I read your post on the difficulty you had finding a suitable ORM product - not surprising, it being an exceptionally crowded marketspace.

Our product "Diamond Binding" covers the large majority of your requirements. From your existing database, it will provide VB.Net (or C#) definitions using generics and nullable types, full support for relationships (again strongly typed lists or dictionaries), inheritance relationships. It generates "plain old .net objects", and just the definitions and metadata for our runtime (based on NHibernate) to perform the heavy lifting. Essentially no code-generation!

In regard to some of your specific requirements, by providing a seperated code model (partial classes similar to the Forms designer) you can resync at any time with the database schema - without losing your customisations.

You don't need a degree in rocket science either - all relationships are inferred from database relationships - its simply a matter of checking which tables, columns and relationships you wish to include. Sensible defaults mean you generally tick the tables you are interested in and wait a few seconds ;)

We strongly agree with "seperation of concerns" - and focus on providing you with a top notch business object framework which you can databind how you choose to your UI, using the tools of your choice. We don't want to force developers into "the one true path".

As for price, a single developer license is $499 - but a completely free (and identical) version is avaliable for personal use, non-profits and academic use.

I'd like to invite you to check out Diamond Binding at http://dunnchurchill.com/products/diamondbinding/

We strongly feel we have created a tool which strikes the correct balance of simplicity, power, reliability and effectiveness - our company mission.

Kind Regards,
Mark Churchill

Mark Churchill