Eric put together a really nice "IDE" for working with SubSonic 2.1. This is a walkthrough on what it is and how to use it. Making It Easy We're really trying to make it simple for people use SubSonic and yes, we know, our docs aren't up to speed. In this screencast I go into how you can use our new tool, SubStage, to see all the options available to you with our Providers, and also how you can generate your code precisely how you want to - all visually. Double-click the video to make it fullscreen - or you can download the WMV here...

I've heard/read rumblings over the last few months that "SubSonic is tightly coupled" and therefore you have to "drag it around" with you in your project. I can see why people might think this - ActiveRecord is not the most testable thing in the world :). I've really tried to push SubSonic into the TDD realm and thought it might be a good idea to show how you can structure up a highly testable, decoupled application using SubSonic as your Data Access tool.

I've spent the passed few weeks polishing up some features for our 2.1 release (aka Pakala), and I've been paying particular attention to Migrations - something I promised would be ready to go a few months back. As of changeset 452 (made today, just now), Migrations are reasonably solid.

Well, these days it looks like it takes a new SubSonic release to get me to actually write a blog post, so I guess I'll have to crank up the rate that we're putting out builds! In any event, I'm happy to announce the third beta of SubSonic 2.1 is now available on CodePlex . There are a ton of fixes in this release, and it's starting to look very solid, with core already faster and more solid that 2.0.3. The next milestone will be Release Candidate 1, which we will get to GA as fast we can, especially since we're very anxious to start taking advantage of the C# 3.0 language features. While we're...

Many people have asked over the last few years if it was possible to use SubSonic without Active Record. They didn't like the idea that every object could interact with the database and wanted a more "locked-down" approach. I offered some interim templates to get around this, but with version 2.1 we've advanced this idea further and included the ability to override the object base class entirely.

Services, Managers, Helpers, Repositories
There just really isn't a good word for this class but I think people have come to embrace the word "Repository" to refer to your database/data store. Hopefully we can agree on the concept here rather than the wording - if not let me know and I'll do my best to duck responsibility...

If you like ActiveRecord - no worries, it's still our default. If you are curious and want to know more about this Repository thing and how it works - you can watch this screencast.

I spose there’s not much more to add to that title. Eric and Shawn Oster have been hard at work while I pretty much have been under water for the last month, getting ready for MIX. Download it here. A whole mess of bugs have been taken care of and Shawn has been a Unit Testing Phreak, nailing sooo many issues that I think I have a new Man Crush now. Here’s a partial fix list: InvalidCastException When Using Nullable Boolean Types in MySql (Re-Opened) Scaffolds do not Support TINYINT Data Type Thread concurrency in method GetTableSchema SubCommander (sonic.exe) doesn’t support the |DataDirectory...

Eric and I have been going full-speed to get this next rev of SubSonic up, and with a LOT of your help we’ve got a beta ready for you. You can download it here. Breaking Changes There are none, w00t! Or, well, there shouldn’t be. If you find some do let me know :). A New Query Tool We have a new Query tool that lives happily alongside our existing one. Our goal with it was to make it as “Fluent” and “SQL-y” as possible. I wrote a post on how it works here , and updated that post here . Please refer to that until can crack out the docs which, yes now that this is my job, I will be spending a good...

We’re working full guns on the next release of SubSonic, fixing bugs implementing literally hundreds of the features you’ve asked for. I wrote previously about our new Query tool , and we’ve introduced some changes to it to make it even more usable and readable. We’ve also implemented the Repository Pattern, which a lot of people favor over Active Record . In this post I’ll talk about that and a few other things that we’ve been working on. No, I don’t know when :). Query2 Updates A lot of people have asked to be able to use the new Query tool without having to identify the schema for each table...

Eric and I have been working just about non-stop on our bug list as well as some very cool innovations that he and I have cooked up over the last six months. We’ve had to wait a bit for the dust to settle in the .NET world (not to mention our personal lives), but I think the wait has been worth it. Over the holidays I was able to create the querying API I’ve been thinking on for the last year, and it has come together nicely. I’d like to show you what I’ve come up with, and ask for your comments and help before we release it with version 2.1 of SubSonic. The Next Rev This is going to be a long...