I only recently came across your tool and I have to say that it looks very interesting. I have already read through a lot of the documentation but there are a couple of things that I have not been able to ascertain, or have simply missed them.

In the past I have always tended to start at the Database (old habits die hard) and then when using EF build the model from the database. Clearly your tool does that. My intention now is to try things the other way around, and clearly your tool does that as well.

Now I see that LLBLGen-Pro supports several frameworks including your own. If I wanted to build an application that would be capable of targeting different platforms (ie windows, Mac os or Linux) could I use your framework or is the choice really going to be EF Core?

Do you have your documentation in Pdf format at all? I like to print stuff out and then annotate it, helps the learning process.

I see that you have some samples on GitHub. Is there one that you would recommend over the others as a good place to start in getting a reasonable understanding of your tool?

Many thanks

Dom

Dom wrote:

I only recently came across your tool and I have to say that it looks very interesting. I have already read through a lot of the documentation but there are a couple of things that I have not been able to ascertain, or have simply missed them.

In the past I have always tended to start at the Database (old habits die hard) and then when using EF build the model from the database. Clearly your tool does that. My intention now is to try things the other way around, and clearly your tool does that as well.

Now I see that LLBLGen-Pro supports several frameworks including your own. If I wanted to build an application that would be capable of targeting different platforms (ie windows, Mac os or Linux) could I use your framework or is the choice really going to be EF Core?

Next week we'll release v5.3 (it's currently in beta), which will contain support for netstandard 2.0 and an updated LLBLGen Pro runtime framework with support for netstandard2.0. This gives you the ability to use (almost all, see: http://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.3/LLBLGen%20Pro%20RTF/NetFullvsNetstandard.htm) all features of the runtime on .net core 2.0, which runs on linux, mac, windows

Do you have your documentation in Pdf format at all? I like to print stuff out and then annotate it, helps the learning process.

No, sorry. We did that for a long time, but as the documentation is so vast, we had to use tools to generate pdf files for the documentation and the results were not really great in general, so we stopped doing that.

I see that you have some samples on GitHub. Is there one that you would recommend over the others as a good place to start in getting a reasonable understanding of your tool?

the examples are mainly to give a context of what the runtime can do in various situations, e.g. mostly the bigger features like datascope (for UI work where you have to maintain a live entity graph in memory), auditing and authorization. So each example does work on the database, like querying, entity modification, but their point is mainly to give an idea how to e.g. do validation, authorization in an app with our framework. To get an understanding of the individual features like how to fetch an entity, any example will do, but I'd recommend to also look at the documentation, like in this case e.g. http://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.3/LLBLGen%20Pro%20RTF/Using%20the%20generated%20code/Adapter/gencode_usingentityclasses_instantiating.htm

Thank you so much for the quick response.

I take your point about the pdf files, I know from my own experience that it can be a pain producing them.

If I were to set up and commence a trial now, could I then try the official 5.3 version when it is released, or would you suggest holding fire until it is released and on the subject of the trial period is it possible (should circumstances require) to request a short extension to the trial period. There are times when work demands can limit the amount of time that one can devote to conducting a proper and fair evaluation which from the look of the documentation your product clearly deserves.

Dom

Dom wrote:

Thank you so much for the quick response.

I take your point about the pdf files, I know from my own experience that it can be a pain producing them.

If I were to set up and commence a trial now, could I then try the official 5.3 version when it is released, or would you suggest holding fire until it is released and on the subject of the trial period is it possible (should circumstances require) to request a short extension to the trial period. There are times when work demands can limit the amount of time that one can devote to conducting a proper and fair evaluation which from the look of the documentation your product clearly deserves.

You can start today and next week install v5.3 and simply load your project file in the v5.3 designer and generate code targeting netstandard2.0 instead. The amount of features not available on netstandard in our framework is very small, so it's unlikely you run into those. One thing netstandard/core don't have is config files so the new thing for v5.3 and netstandard is the runtimeconfiguration system we added (see: http://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.3/LLBLGen%20Pro%20RTF/Using%20the%20generated%20code/gencode_runtimeconfiguration.htm)

Would it be necessary to extend the trial with a week or so, just email us

hope this helps!

We've released v5.3 today. You can download a new Trial installer which will install v5.3 and you can start using our runtime on .net core after that

Thanks for letting me know I shall do that.

Just as a matter of interest I've been reading through past forum entries on the use of LLBLGen-Pro and the most vexatious of topics WPF and MVVM. One of the main reasons dot net core support is useful is that ability to target cross platform. Current xaml (aka Wpf) is pretty much the only option and whilst I freely admit to a great love of Winforms I have to accept that there came a point when it really didn't scale and at that time I decided to get to grips with wpf and with that I chose to adopt MVVM.

Have your views on the subject changed over the years. EF Core can work quite well with models that implement INotifyPrpertyChanged and Changing and I was wondering how easy that was to implement straight out of the box as it were, by which you could infer that I haven't found an easy way of doing it so far.

Dom

Dom wrote:

Thanks for letting me know I shall do that.

Just as a matter of interest I've been reading through past forum entries on the use of LLBLGen-Pro and the most vexatious of topics WPF and MVVM. One of the main reasons dot net core support is useful is that ability to target cross platform. Current xaml (aka Wpf) is pretty much the only option and whilst I freely admit to a great love of Winforms I have to accept that there came a point when it really didn't scale and at that time I decided to get to grips with wpf and with that I chose to adopt MVVM.

Have your views on the subject changed over the years. EF Core can work quite well with models that implement INotifyPrpertyChanged and Changing and I was wondering how easy that was to implement straight out of the box as it were, by which you could infer that I haven't found an easy way of doing it so far. Dom

You mean the conflicting interfaces and that you have to implement either one but not both? The entities do implement INotifyPropertyChanged, and the EntityView(2) objects do implement IBindingListView and other interfaces to make a bound control happy. Not the changing interface tho, as that conflicts with other interfaces. However that's OK, controls have to implement support for the other interfaces anyway so in practice it's not going to be a problem.

Our framework also provides a system to make life easier for binding to controls: DataScope: http://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.3/LLBLGen%20Pro%20RTF/Using%20the%20generated%20code/gencode_datascopes.htm which takes care of building a unit of work for you from the changes made by the user in the UI.