Hi James,

To be honest, I'm no longer using SubSonic for anything important in mojoportal and somewhere along the way I broke my custom build of SubSonic that used to work for Sqlite and it no longer works. I think I updated to a newer version of their files and then something got broken and I have not got around to solving it. At some point I would like to repair my custom build so I can at least use the scaffold pages in all the dbs, but right now the scaffold only works for me with MS SQL (using my broken custom build of SubSonic). But I have a lot of other higher priorites before I will get to that.

My main reasons for losing enthusiasm with SubSonic is just that I noticed it increases memory usage, looking at the code, they are doing a lot of string concatenation where they should be using stringbuilder. I like things to be fast and lightweight, and also when there is a problem in the data access code I like to be able to get right to the sql quickly and not have to debug through all the SubSonic stuff to figure out the problem. I've backed out the use of SubSonic in mojoportal everywhere except the developer scaffold, and as I mentioned it only works for MS SQL right now.

Wish I could be more help,

Best,

Joe

Hi James,

Any solution that works for you sounds good. I am going to continue including SubSonic but its only going to be used on this developer scaffold page which is disabled by default and is not really menat for use by site owners but only for developers. So its an unimportant feature and if you don't want it you can remove or replace my SubSonic settings in Web.config and replace the dll with your own. Or any other solution that works seems reasonable to me.

Best,

Joe

Hi,

The first thing you should understand is the plugin model for feature development is very simple and the main integration is at the UI level so there is no limit on what you can use in your own custom development in terms of busines logic or data access. You don't have to do things the way I do them. If you like SubSonics, or LINQ, or NHibernate or whatever, there is nothing stopping you from using those things.

Myself, I do not like OR Mappers, I like straight forward sql code optimized for the specific db. I breifly became enamored with SubSonic because I thought it would make things easier to support for the non MS SQL data layers. But I found it added a lot of overhead and when there were problems it was much harder to debug my way through the subsonic code. I went back to just using Codesmith to generate standard dal code for each layer as a starting point for feature development. Its only a little more work on the front end to implement a true db specific dal than SubSonic and its easier to fix things because I can just go right to the sql when there is a bug, and less resources are used at runtime. As I've said, I think SubSonic is still useful in terms of developer scaffolding but I have no plans to use it going forward for production feature code.

I also have no plans to use LINQ to SQL or Entity framework in my own work.

At some point I would like to do some things with Silverlight, but thats the only big new feature beyond 2.0 .NET that really seems compelling to me. There are small things besides that that seem attractive like the new way you can combine all the javascript files and dynamic data, but I will be treading lightly about using that stuff for a while because I don't want to break compatibility with Mono.

For your scheduler project, you might want to look at DayPilot as something you could use in the UI. I used it in my new Event Calendar Pro product. The dll for the free open source version of DayPilot is already in the mojoportal solution in the _libs folder.

Best,

Joe