Thursday, October 15, 2009
Extraordinary ORM Tool
Now, I'm not the world's best programmer and far be it from me to join the throng of people who regularly bash Microsoft, but I have come across an ORM tool for use with Visual Studio that cuts my code by more than 80%.
I know that's a big claim, but I can prove it.
One of the projects that I have been involved in over the past few years is a POS application that works on touch screen POS terminals. If you have ever written an application for a POS terminal you will know that RAM memory is always less than optimal, and CPU grunt is, well, always "grunting" because it really should be a more powerful CPU.
I recently had a customer who was running my software on a standard POS terminal, but it failed whenever they tried to use the stock module. Working everywhere else; but not at this site. To cut a long story short, I decided to bring forward a re-write of the stock module using an ORM tool from Dev Express called XPO.
After my first test I realised I had stumbled upon something wonderful that was completely unexpected. You see, the reason I decided to use XPO was because of the benefits it gave me in design efficiencies, (and because I am a fan of the DevExpress GUI controls, especially their DataGrid. [Gratuitous Promotion OFF]). However, what I did not expect was a very large reduction in my code base.
I ran a little tool I use called Line Count by Rich Newman (see: http://richnewman.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/c-and-vbnet-line-count-utility/) that counted lines of code in various ways. The upshot of it all is XPO reduced my data access layer code by over 82%.
Previously, I had been using DataSets and TableAdapters. I always knew I had to move to proper OOP code, hence the planed re-write, but never have I had such an encouragement to do so. Obviously XPO cannot take credit for all the gain, but the improvement is not only in reduce code base. The functionality is much greater, the speed is faster, and the "sense" of robustness is very assuring. And if that's not enough, my business logic code is also smaller.
Hats off to XPO.
I may not be the world's best programmer, but I am now one of the smarter ones :-)
I know that's a big claim, but I can prove it.
One of the projects that I have been involved in over the past few years is a POS application that works on touch screen POS terminals. If you have ever written an application for a POS terminal you will know that RAM memory is always less than optimal, and CPU grunt is, well, always "grunting" because it really should be a more powerful CPU.
I recently had a customer who was running my software on a standard POS terminal, but it failed whenever they tried to use the stock module. Working everywhere else; but not at this site. To cut a long story short, I decided to bring forward a re-write of the stock module using an ORM tool from Dev Express called XPO.
After my first test I realised I had stumbled upon something wonderful that was completely unexpected. You see, the reason I decided to use XPO was because of the benefits it gave me in design efficiencies, (and because I am a fan of the DevExpress GUI controls, especially their DataGrid. [Gratuitous Promotion OFF]). However, what I did not expect was a very large reduction in my code base.
I ran a little tool I use called Line Count by Rich Newman (see: http://richnewman.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/c-and-vbnet-line-count-utility/) that counted lines of code in various ways. The upshot of it all is XPO reduced my data access layer code by over 82%.
Previously, I had been using DataSets and TableAdapters. I always knew I had to move to proper OOP code, hence the planed re-write, but never have I had such an encouragement to do so. Obviously XPO cannot take credit for all the gain, but the improvement is not only in reduce code base. The functionality is much greater, the speed is faster, and the "sense" of robustness is very assuring. And if that's not enough, my business logic code is also smaller.
Hats off to XPO.
I may not be the world's best programmer, but I am now one of the smarter ones :-)
Labels: Business, Development, Technology
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