I'm a pretty good C# developer, but I've never done something like this; how would I create a CRUD application generator?

Question

I found SubSonic, but I'd rather roll my own with a few buddies.

I've never done something like this before, but if you tell me technically how I should proceed, I can figure it out.

I want to have a sort of visual designer. Ask the user what tables there are going to be, the relations, what fields, which are primary keys, etc.

Then generate all the appropriate classes with the appropriate DAL and SQL database.

After all is said and done, I'd like to output a simple .exe file with a generic look that allows a user to view all the fields, etc.

Any tips, I'm not sure if I should mark this a community wiki or not, because I don't think there is a specific answer. Let me know SO.

Answer 1

You could do something similar to what we do (though we generate a domain layer). Take the MS DSL tools and construct graphical DSL that contains the elements of your DAL (procs, tables, triggers etc). That is not too hard.

Add say drag and drop from the server explorer window to allow reverse engineering of persistence mappings and then write a few T4 templates to generate the code of the DSL model.