Whither NetTiers?

Question

I used NetTiers in a number of projects a job or two back. I found it extremely useful for generating back-end interfaces in ASP.NET webforms. The business and data layers were also pretty sweet. I typically use NHibernate, but I think it may be overkill on these particular projects in terms of the time it will take to get running.

Since then, I've been working on projects where practically everything is end-user facing. However, I've recently gotten a side project that will have a lot of back-end administrative stuff and was wondering if NetTiers is still as well-maintained and clean as it was a couple of years back. It doesn't appear to be, but I don't know if that means that it has actually been abandoned or if it has merely been moved elsewhere. Or is there another product (preferably a set of CodeSmith templates) that might work better for me? All I really need is a clean ActiveRecord model that can hit a SQL database on the backend and generate simple user interfaces for CRUD screens for most of my model objects. I need something that will do deep-loading of object graphs kind of like NetTiers will do as well.

Any suggestions?

Ingenerate

Answer 1

I'm currently supporting a large NetTiers application and my experience has generally been one of frustration. I inherited the project and took over maintenance of the templates, fixing a number of bugs in the templates and applying some post-generation scripts to the generated files. IMHO the generated code is overly verbose, suffers from massive duplication, and would benefit from more use of generics. The templates I'm working with didn't dispose of resources correctly (the newer template versions may be better). At one point I considered upgrading to a newer version but the size of the exercise put me off. Useful documentation is difficult to find and getting answers to NetTiers questions is not straight forward. The overall impression I have is one of gradual decline.

If you're just after a simple .Net stack for generating a UI from a SQL database I suggest you take a look at ASP.NET MVC3 with MvcScaffolding and Entity Framework. Add AutoMapper and Munq for DI.

Toothlike

I would argue that NHibernate with Fluent NHibernate and NHibernate Mapping Generator is good enough for simple to large projects. Small projects have a tendency to grow large pretty quickly :-) Recently helped a client diagnose a memory leak caused by .NetTiers and can attest to the "tears" part. – Unison

I cannot agree more with the answer above. The tools works fine with even enterprise size of databases but its highly outdated, templates are poor quality with numerous bugs, unintuitive interfaces, serious design flaws and dramatic deeploading. Performance wise it's not amazing either, thanks to pretty bad management of lists and mentioned deepload/deepsave. There is great potential for configuration and overrides at any level, but there is huge price in code repetition that could be limited easily with better design. – Dandle

Answer 2

We have been using NetTiers for several years now. I think it tend to look overwhelming for first time users, in terms of quantity of stuff generated, and there are a couple of limitations around the DeepLoad functionallity and circularities. I too have the feeling that there have not been many updates lately, but in the overall I've had a great experience using Nettiers with codesmith, and from all the ones I've tried, it's clearly our favorite, with huge productivity gains. We use views, custom sp's, the indexes, etc.

In a comment to another reply: We've tried Automapper, and moved away from it due to the fact that it fails silently when the object's structures change. And moved away from Entity Framework because we don't like hand-coding our DALs. :)

Hamlani

RE:AutoMapper - AssertConfigurationIsValid() – Don