I have to say that I am a huge fan of ASP.NET Dynamic Data for simple database-driven web applications. Many web applications being built today are simply forms-over-data web applications that are nothing but a front-end to a database with a little bit of validation logic and very little business logic. Do not waste your time developing these applications by hand - complete waste of money and time. Your first course of action would be to try and get it up and running with ASP.NET Dynamic Data with all its wonderful scaffolding and templates.
A new preview of Dynamic Data was just released that contains a lot of the features that will ship with ASP.NET 4.0 that you can use today. Per the CodePlex website:
- DynamicDataVNextSamples - This contains a variety of samples that show off the various new aspects of Dyamic Data Preview 4.
- DynamicDataSamples – This is the primary project sample that shows most of the new functionality that has been added to Dynamic Data since .NET 3.5 SP1. The default.aspx page highlights many of the new items that are being added in .NET 4, in particular: Filter Templates, Entity Templates, Field Templates, Many to Many Relationships, Enumerations and Inheritence.
- SimpleDynamicDataSamples - This sample project demonstrates new functionality that allows Dynamic Data field templates to be used by applications without any requirements (no data model is required (but can be used), no routing is required, no registration globally is required. Just take a data control and use the code DataControl.EnableDynamicData. This automatically gives the data control automatic validation and supports the attributes in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.
- DataSourceQueryExtenderSamples – One of the new big features in ASP.NET 4 is the QueryExtender control. This control allows very simple filtering for data source controls for common operations that developers want to do like search for a string across columns, check if the value of a column is in a certain range and other operations. These samples also show the DomainDataSource which is a new ASP.NET data source control that will be used to access .NET RIA Service Domain Services. See the .NET RIA Service section at the bottom of the document for how to download and install the tooling support for Domain Services.
- ADO.NET DataServices - This project contains a sample DataServiceLinqDataSource which is an ASP.NET data source for accessing ADO.NET Data Services from web pages.
- ProjectTemplates - These are starter projects that can be used to build brand new applications that have support for all the new features in the Preview. To start just copy the directory that supports the data model that you are using to a working folder, create a data model and register it in Global.asax.
- DomainServiceProject - This is for projects using the .NET RIA Domain Service for the data access layer.
- EntityFrameworkProject - This is for projects using Entity Framework models for the data access layer.
- LinqToSqlProject - This is for projects using Linq to SQL for the data access layer.
I have used Dynamic Data on a few Intranet Projects for clients and they absolutely love it, especially how quickly and cheaply I created the applications ;)
The only question I have is - “Where is the ASP.NET MVC Love?” Surely they still can't be “looking to see where Dynamic Data may fit with ASP.NET MVC” given ASP.NET MVC has been around for over a year in some fashion. Could they? :)
Check out the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview 4 bits.
More on code generation, o/r mappers, and dynamic data tutorials.
David Hayden