Have you successfully deployed a project using dOOdads?

[mike.griffin]

Folks often ask me how stable is dOOdads? Have you had anybody implement a project using dOOdads? Please help your fellow (potential) users out by offering your experiences with dOOdads by replying to this thread.

Thanx

[mgnoonan]

Please forgive the long-winded reply.

I have only recently started using dOOdads, but my experience with Mike and Justin goes back a couple of years now. We all worked for the same company on a project for a Fortune 50 company. It was during this project that the initial groundwork for dOOdads was born. Mike and Justin came up with the basic framework for code generation and ORM which would go on to be the backbone of that application. Non-disclosure forbids me from going in to details.

But what I can say is that MyGeneration and dOOdads are an evolution of that framework. Having worked with both, I can say without hesitation that dOOdads is easy to use, easy to implement, and performs excellently. So far, the hardest sell with my clients has been the name (sorry, Mike!).

I have just completed an ecommerce site, which is due to go into production shortly, where I was given 90 hours to implement new functionality. Thanks to MyGen, I was able to rewrite all of the database layer (which was horrible) to include all of the new functionality, streamline the site code (also horrible, both html and vb.net), add transactional support, identify broken code paths, and finally, add the new functionality...

...all within the same 90 hours. Needless to say, my client is very pleased. I will make an announcement here when the new site code goes into production.

Beyond customer projects, I use a lot of code in my internal business processes that is borrowed from the Microsoft Starter Kits available from http://www.asp.net. Once you use dOOdads and get comfortable with Mike's (brilliant) approach, it's amazing how you look at Microsoft's approach and say, \"that's just not easy to use or maintain.\" So I have spent some time rewriting the Starter Kits to use dOOdads.

I guess the bottom line for me is, I would not hesitate to recommend their use. I admit I'm not an unbiased observer because I have worked with dOOdads (in one form or another) for over 2 years now. But as an independent consultant, you don't stick with things for long if they don't work.

[heromull]

I'm using dOOdads (btw I happen to like the name) for an online CRUD app opening end of January. I have about 80 entry forms and expect around 300k users over 9 months. I came to MyGeneration in hopes of generating code for use with Microsoft's Data Access Application Block and found dOOdads. After reading the docs and forum I switched. I was able to begin using dOOdads imediately because of the existing MyGen templates and sample apps. I'm not a data access expert so I went with the \"do the simplest thing that could possibly work\" approach and dOOdads seems to fit the bill for my particular app. Testing has gone well and I'll report back in a few weeks how production goes.

[mkamoski]

Folks often ask me how stable is dOOdads? Have you had anybody implement a project using dOOdads? Please help your fellow (potential) users out by offering your experiences with dOOdads by replying to this thread.

Thanx

...FWIW....

...I did not use dOOdads; but, I did use MyGeneration along with my own templates...

...the project had a complete entity layer (~75K LOC) and coupled SPs (~13K LOC) all generated from MyGeneration templates...

...I wrote the UI code, the ObjectManager code, a handful of generic utility objects by hand...

...it worked out great and saved A LOT of time...

[tsilva]

I started using dOOdads about a year ago, on a project that required lots of CRUD operations on a SQL Server. I was mainly looking for a better way to quickly generate data access layer code, without manually writing them. That stuff can eat up project time, especially when you have over 100 tables that need some kinda of insert/update.

Needless to say, I found dOOdads and within a week, I had completely read the docs and learned dOOdads and generated my Data access layer, and was already on my way to writing my web forms with the backend provided via dOOdads business objects. The project is very heavily used by school districts and some state agencies, and has a very stable and scalable architecture based on the dOOdads framework.

For anyone looking to cut project development time significantly, YOU MUST LOOK INTO dOOdads. I give Mike and Justin two thumbs up for the great product they've developed, and the excellent technical support they've provided through the forums.

I'll be looking forward to EntitySpaces, can't wait to see the Relational model around dOOdads take shape. It will definitely inspire me to dive into .NET 2.0.

Cheers

[3D]

I came across MyGeneration about 8 months ago. First I was only looking for an alternative for a code generator I was using at this time. Then I read the help files for dOOdads and thought that I should give it a try. Everything I could think of was there except that I needed dOOdads for ODBC and stored procedured haven't been an option. Another problem was that the company I was working for at this time (and still do but on a contract basis) has to support quite a few different databases.

To cut a long story short. I wrote dOOdads for ODBC without stored procedures and introduced it to my co-workers. We decided to use dOOdads for porting an Order Management System and a CIM System into the .NET world. It is a huge success and the product gets shipped worldwide.

Quantity says nothing about quality but it might in this case. Considering that the product is using ~600 tables makes me say:

dOOdads is stable!!!

3D

[mrbluejello]

The great thing about this platform is that in most (if not all) layers of its database access, it is all EARLY BOUND. Despite its performance-enhancing benefits, many developers will not do the work it takes to define everything in an early-bound fashion, as it causes them to create lots of code. Code that has to be maintained, and changed. This means...

Not relying on \"Select * from table...\" for all queries, which brings back unnecessary data when only needing one or two fields. By default dOOdads will pull down all fields of an row, but you can easily limit which columns you bring back if you have a huge data column that you don't need clogging up your data pipe.

Using pre-compiled stored procedures, instead of relying on run-time SQL statement generation, and run-time RDBMS SQL compilation.

You don't need a code generator or dOOdads to gain these benefits, but you do need one if you don't want to have to do any work to gain these benefits.

[tjdulka]

We have just released a version 1.02 of a ASP to ASP.NET project re-architecture. I used the dOOdads arch for the Data Entities in the data tier. I created a template for Business Object on top of the Data Entities that utilizes the foreign key relationships to encapsulate parent child class relationships. I also used the aliasing to rename the business objects in form familiar to the business users of the application. I added support for objects and collections of encapusulated objects in the business object code. The PRESERVE code regions have allowed for business logic to be added quite easily. We also added C# style comments to the VB source in the code gen (realized by VB Commenter) and used NDOC to generate our MSDN style documentation of the business objects (with code samples for each object!!). I just demo'ed today to my customer the ease of use of this arch with the new set of enchancement they are planning for their 2.0 release. New database tables and columns rolling all the way up to their use of the business objects transparently. I found MyGeneration in late Oct and we went into a test release cycle with the newly architected product by Dec 15th. Thank you for your excellent effort in these tools.

[ggp2005]

Hi Mike and Justin

Kind GREETINGS and CONGRATULATIONS for you and all the community had contributed to reach what MyGeneration is today, really all of you have made a great product, and free.

I developed the first project with MyGeneration with a pleasant experience. I used VS.NET 2003, C#, MSDE, MyGeneration and dOOdads.

In general I had no problems.

With this nice product I feel confortable in the Data Access Layer.
I feel I have the control over the DAL.

The App I have developed is working healthy with the help of MyGeneration.

Before choose MyGeneration I tested several ORMs solutions, but how you can see I stayed here.

Nice job guys.

Best Regards
Gianfranco

[mike.griffin]

I found this link out there, Patrick Wellink's blog:
http://bloggingabout.net/wellink/archiv ... /2477.aspx

There are some other topics on MyGeneration on his blog as well if you hit the home button you can see those as well.

[kierepka]

Hi

I'm moving now great bug tracking software from aspx pages into code behind and of corse dOOdads as database layer . Look at
BugTracker.NET -> VS BugTracker.NET.

Regards

[nickbeentjes]

I have had dOOdads in production in a multi-user call center environment now for well over a year. This has been an absolute life saver and gives me no problems whatsoever.

I looked at a lot of ERD modeling software when starting out and doodads is by far the best product available for database developers using .NET for the simple reason that it works, is solid, is open source and is simple to use.

Unfortunately I can not tell anyone I know about the product, because once they know my secret, I may have to work for a living .....

I love it, thanks Mike....

Nick

[mhensen]

I am working with dOOdads for a couple of months now.. It is stable and I don't want anything else for now..

Loving it all the way... It has saved me quite a lot of tedious programming hours..

Loving it to death Mike, otherwise I would be gone crazy now, because I am now working at a client that has no specs for the software it want's to be written, so a lot of changes occur from time to time.. dOOdads are my saver!!!!


Michael Hensen
The Netherlands

[kierepka]

I just rewrite current database layer, business logic and special server for bendit.no in MakingWaves.
I 2 days I rewrite whole project and:
1) Add additional functionality
2) Check and fix current problems
3) Make code more secure

In next 2 days we test this solution and it is:
1) Quicker (sometimes a lot - I optimized queries and stored procedures)
2) I can faster develop new functionality

So another success story using dOOdads

Regards

[Soennichsen]

Until now, I have realized about 5 intranet based web projects (small to medium) in ASP.NET with MyGeneration and it is really working stable and is a big time saver. In addition, MyGeneration makes it easier to build a good architecture even for small projects. I always build a class library for the abstract (and my concrete) classes generated from MyGen. This allows using this class library in more than one application. I had the problem more than once that the customer says something like: I want now an Outlook application to access the contact information we have in the database. No problem with the existing data layer: it took me only 2 days to build a stable Outlook integration (most of the time I had to find out how to clean up all Outlook object resources...).
The generated Stored Procedures are also pretty cool. In that way SQL Injection is not a matter and the Stored Procedures meet often the design requirements in larger companies.

What is found sometimes a little bit confusing is the way to write complex queries. I always go to this forum and read the examples, but most of the time I have to debug what SQL will be generated from MyGeneration.

For the german dotnet-magazin http://www.dotnetmagazin.de/ have I written an article about MyGeneration. It is an introduction into MyGeneration, dOOdads and how to write Templates.

Sven Sönnichsen
http://itdevcon.com
http://sven-s.de/blog

[asifch]

Hi,

I have come to know about the MyGeneration and Doodads a year ago when we are researching about the Data Access Layer of a big Asp.Net Application. I have evaluated different solutions but go for Doodads because of its simplicity and ease.
Although I was not sure about the Performance and usability of the Doodads architecture at that time but because Doodads’ source is available so I give it a try. And I am really surprised by the usability of the Doodads.

Our application has an Oracle Database of nearly 1000 tables in 13 different Schemas and more then 2500 Web Forms. For Such a Big application, Doodads increase the development Speed nearly 40 to 50 Percent.

All the Credit goes to the Doodads that we are able to finish the Application within Time. The best advantage is that you don't have to be worried about the Data Base Change, because on updating your classes you will find all the areas which need to be modified to reflect the data base change which in other case will be too difficult.

I have also used the Doodads in a Small Financial Windows Application and I found it perfect and now am planning to use it in another Web Application.

I really impressed by the Work of the \"Mike Griffin\" and \"Justin Greenwood\". These people are just awesome. At one time I get into a problem which at the end found to be a bug and these people has helped me in such a short time and provide the Best Support.

Although the Performance of the Doodads is really nice but If there is some builtin caching in the Doodads then it will perform really fast.

I will Highly, Highly recommend the MyGeneration and The Doodads to any body and told them to just give it a single Try.....

[Brandon]

Hi

I recently relaunched my online business and used dOOdad as the foundation.

Previously my buysiness was built around DotNetNuke and that was ok. DotNetNuketurned out to not be a good technology for my business. The main issue for me was DotNetNuke module development was very cumbersome and debugging was a little difficult. So I said hell with it, lets just start over.

dOOdads along with MyGeneration really helped me get going fast. All that boring database coding that I, and many of you, had been doing for the last 10 years was done in a matter of minutes and any changes to my database schema were a easy to deal with. It's hard for to quantify exactly how much time it saved me, but I'd say around 50%.

One of my applications which utilizes dOOdads issues thousand of SQL Server queries per minute, and it works great.

I've not experienced one problem with dOOdads. You should try it!