Billy McCafferty, another geek from GeeksWithBlogs, wrote about a project called “ASP.NET ActionPack”. The project is intended to leverage the same code-generation capabilities as Ruby-on-Rails, and does fairly the same job (creating Admin screens for Create/Update/Delete CRUD tasks), should end providing fair degree of classes customizations too. It's hosted on CodePlex by the way.
I din't like Ruby On Rails since I saw some sceencast on it 2 month ago, and I have some comment on the creation of ASP.NET ActivePack as well that I'll mention later in this post, but I have to admit that I really like the idea.
This reminded me of the days of .NET Tiers, which is a famous CodeSmith template just for that! I was the first one to use / customize the generated templates (especially the admin screens) and showed my chosen practices to my ex-colleagues afterwards. It was quite useful though you had to have some concerns when thinking of the project to make the best use out of it. (I know it now has built-in integration with ATLAS and ATLAS Toolkit, but I haven't tried this myself yet).
Now in SilverKey, the guys were kind enough to help me learn the API of llBlGen. llBlGen doesn't create admin pages, but it generates a VERY prowerful UI that makes you able to do almost anything with your data. In our projects, things don't usually go the very traditional way, and we have some certain standars, so, the guys here didn't really mind creating the pages from scratch, and I agreed with them.
Personally, I had an eye on BlinQ. This is a Microsoft Project build on Microsoft LINQ (or ADO.NET v3.0) as one of ASP.NET Sand Box Projects, and it gets highlighted by Microsoft from time to time (Read Brad Abrams post on it ). It has an active forum in ASP.NET Forums too. Man, this's got to be the right answer for the O/R and CRUD UI generation. It's cool, build on a great platfrom, and hello, it's by Microsoft (IF you do consder this an advantage, not else ;-) - For me , a non official Microsoft Salesman as my friends call me, sure it's :-D).
I think we and Microsoft should look at BlinQ as already done with ATLAS, getting so much cmmunity support that pushes it more steps every CTP until it's now more closer to release. Leaving the whole thing and creating a new similar project just doesn't sound the best thing to do in my own opinion. I don't know any one working on BlinQ right now except Polita Paulus, who looked like a very cool girl in her Channel9 video introducing BlinQ (She's a member of ASP.NET data controls team by the way, the one that creates the data controls we use everyday).
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