NBusiness

New Post: VS2008 Again

tanden — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:32:54 GMT

Thanks Justin, I got the Entity item in the list. I'll be playing with it a little this weekend to get a feel for the framework - I may have a small project next week where it might come in handy. In that case, I'll of course produce patches for anything that's changed.

New Post: VS2008 Again

justinc — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:20:12 GMT

Ah yes, well there is plenty left to do before it's fully ready but it should work for you in VS 2008. The plugin usability has plenty left to do that's for sure.

However a few things to note:

The new version doesn't have NBusiness projects! This ends up being a much simpler solution, in the older version you had NBusiness projects with C#/VB partial classes with it which totally eliminated syntax hilighting and intellisense in those code files. That was very painful now E# files can exist in any regular .net project. Try creating a console application in C# (for example) and adding a new item. In your new items list you should see an "Entity". If you don't you can just add a text file and use the .es file extension. Make sure the custom tool ESharpCodeGenerator is applied to your es file. To get the "Entity" to show up in your new items list you might have to run "devenv /rootSuffix exp /ranu /setup" from the visual studio command prompt. Getting those templates registered is sometimes a pain in the butt for the experimental hive.
Templates are sparse right now, that's what I have been working on. Creating templates is time consuming... but you can easily create your own. One new feature of v3 is that you can define templates in the same project that you declare your entities. Just add a reference to NBusiness.Templates then create a class that inherits from TemplateBase or CodeDomTemplatebase. Make sure you build once but then you should be able to use that template to do your code generation.
You can also use Spark or NVelocity to do your code generation, this is heavily under construction right now though. I have created a few "Custom Tools" that you can apply to .spark or .nv files to generate a class that inherits from TemplateBase for you. This is not very pluggable right now but if you want to use a different view engine I can help you figure out how and would be happy to accept patches for new view engines. So far Spark has been treating me pretty well... except that it only works with C# currently :( I've also been toying around with creating a XAML based view engine for generating code... it's pretty cool but might be more work that it's worth at this point.
The default business object framework needs lots of TLC. I've been creating templates targeting CSLA for now. I plan on having templates for both later on. Targeting new frameworks (NHibernate for example) will require a patch to allow you to detect validation rules etc. for intellisense. There is nothing stopping you from targetting them but it won't detect rules automatically (it turns out that is an incredibly hard problem).
Basically, most phases are in process right now. The core functionality "works" now it's just a matter of polishing up the VS integration piece and building templates and generally making the barrier to entry lower.

New Post: VS2008 Again

tanden — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:55:43 GMT

Hi,
I have an installation of Visual Studio 2008 with the VS SDK. The latest source from SVN (as of Aug. 2) compiles (almost) cleanly. However, when trying the 'experimental hive' of Visual Studio I still can't get any projects having to do with E# projects. Am I missing something, or is support for VS2008 not ready yet? If not, how would you suggest I proceed in order to test drive NBusiness?

Thanks for your time and efforts!
Yuval

Source code checked in, #34514

justinc — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:29:10 GMT

I have switched the default template generators over to use Spark. I have also changed the template engine model where you have to create a custom tool for each type of template engine you wish to have. These are somewhat easy to create. Spark is a lot better than NVelocity!

Updated Wiki: Home

justinc — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:47:36 GMT

NBusiness: A Entity Domain Specific Language Tool
A .NET Entity DSL Provider, Templated Code Generator, Visual Studio Plugin and Business Object Framework

note: [This wiki is in the process of updating for v3 of NBusiness, some pages may not be accurate right now]

NBusiness is a Visual Studio Plugin that allows you to define entities and models in projects of various languages (i.e. C#, VB and Boo). Once defined these Entities and Models can be attached to Templates that will generate code in the language of the project. NBusiness can be used to generate middle tiers of applications as well as SQL for performing data access and even database tables.

NBusiness includes Templates for generating CSLA business objects and NBusiness business objects. Templates are easy to create and existing Templates are easy to customize.

Benefits of using NBusiness
NBusiness differentiates itself from other code generators with a few distinct points:

Your DSL is E# rather than XML.

Computers like to read XML but people like to read Code.
Source Control software doesn't like to merge XML but it does like to merge Code.

Your DSL is the source of truth NOT the database.
NBusiness supports business objects, not just data access.
Object oriented templates.

NBusiness also comes with some template generator tools for popular view engines such as NVelocity and Spark.

Visual Studio Integration (v2.0, screenshot)

More Information
To get more information about NBusiness please visit the other areas of our wiki pages:

Extending NBusiness

Extras

Gold Parser Grammar

justnbusiness - An NBusiness developer blog
Futures

Powered By NBusiness

feel free to use this logo on your site!

Developers Wanted!
We're looking for developers experienced with business object frameworks, code generation, ORM, compilers or unit testing. Furthermore we're seeking conversation on how best to define syntax for "Entity Languages" and the responsibilities of business objects. We are also looking for anyone experienced in Aspect Oriented Programming and Intentional Programming to help expand our minds and to help us incorporate those concepts as well as possible.

If you would like to join the NBusiness team or contact the project lead send an email to justncase80@gmail.com

Source code checked in, #34422

justinc — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:35:19 GMT

Cleaning up the end to end process. The ESharpCodeGenerator will now create one file for each template on an entity.

Source code checked in, #34398

justinc — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:10:27 GMT

Underlying frameworks are now accessed through IFrameworkService, Csla is currently supported. The unit tests will need to be majorly fixed up but validation rules are now working for Csla.

Source code checked in, #34386

justinc — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:15:27 GMT

Source code checked in, #34288

justinc — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:39:57 GMT

Some validation changes, somewhat working. Still a few tests to touch up. You can now specify a delegate in your settings as a validationbase type and it will find methods that match it's signature as rules.

Source code checked in, #34204

justinc — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:40:48 GMT

improved code coverage for Query library and addition of the NBusinessTemplateCodeGenerator.

Source code checked in, #34154

justinc — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:48:05 GMT

Improved code coverage for NBusiness.Data.Providers.SqlServer

Source code checked in, #34123

justinc — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:33:14 GMT

Big updates to the Query library and the Model library. The query library now supports insert/update/delete as well as fetch. Can be used for transactions and will be the only way to communicate into the IDataProvider from the model library.

Source code checked in

justinc — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:12:20 GMT

a variety of upgrades in process.

Source code checked in

justinc — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:22:05 GMT

Source code checked in

justinc — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:42:00 GMT

Fixed up intellisense, the beginnings are there. Some big performance improvements in hilighting and intellisense. There is still lots of room for improvement.

Source code checked in

justinc — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:00:30 GMT

Big improvements with VisualStudio parsing performance. Some colorizing changes, but I still can't figure out how to get intellisense to appear without hitting ctrl+j. Everything appears to be correct yet it still does not call "GetDeclarations".

Source code checked in

justinc — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:39:25 GMT

Authorization tests.

Source code checked in

justinc — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:59:20 GMT

Added more unit tests for access rules. Found a bug related to file encoding and fixed that and added some unit tests.

Source code checked in

justinc — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 03:20:26 GMT

Beginning to imlement arbitrary access rules. Passing first unit test. Code comments unit tests.

Source code checked in

justinc — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:11:28 GMT

Created a unit test for testing custom validation rule frameworks.