3rd Party Tools

[Guest]

I'm researching different component suites to use in VS 2005 and SQL 2005.
I'm a beginner @ C# and ASP, so I'm looking for something stable, fast, and
easy to learn. I've found 2 that I think are good, Syncfusion's Essential
Studio and ComponentOne's Studio Enterprise. Has anyone used either one and
can critic good/bad? Are there other suites you would recommend?

Thanks!

 

[Martin Z]

This is a bit offtopic, but if you're a beginner at C# and ASP trying
to get into new projects, you should be looking into ORM tools as well
- directly using ADO.NET is tedious in the extreme unless you're doing
a straight GUI-to-database setup without any business object modelling
in C#.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply. What does ORM stand for, and can you suggest a couple?

 

[Martin Z]

Object-Relational-Mapping layer. A way to get properly typed objects
into and out of the database without manually converting the parameters
into ADO.Net parameters and converting stuff from the resulting
DataSets back into objects. Even simply calling a stored procedure in
a database can require lines upon lines of verbose ADO.Net code.

Microsoft has an ORM system built into the next version (C# 3.0) called
Linq - you can download the beta version from their website.
Otherwise, the most popular is NHibernate - an opensource solution.
There are numerous though, exhaustively compared (outdated) C2 page:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ObjectRelationalToolComparisonDotNet