TextMetal, a zero friction open source text templating engine for .NET and Mono, announced full support for Mono for Android (MfA) 1.9. TextMetal is a powerful text templating engine written in C# which uses an extensible XML-based dialect and is suitable for use in automation scenarios and code generation situations.
The TextMetal development team has been keenly interested in the MfA platform for some time. Based on their own experiences crafting well engineered data driven applications on the server and the desktop, the mobile space is the next logical progression. Several large applications in production leverage the tool and its output such as linkedinform.com, imagefencing.com, vhda.com, et al. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel nor wanting to leverage heavy, bloated, complex object relational/mapping frameworks (LINQ, Entity Framework, NHibernate, etc.), the development team originally built TextMetal as a slimmed down fork of the previous Software is Hardwork Library (same development team). This allowed the team to focus on text templating/code generation scenarios in general; with automatically generated domain/data layer generation in specific. While the code underlying the templating engine remains mostly generic and constant, a set of baseline template XML files (<root>\templates\AdoNet_Code_Generation) ship with TextMetal that, when provided a SQL Server 2005 or higher database connection, will generate a set of C# projects (DomainModel [data access], Unit Tests, and Integration Tests). Within the C# Domain Model project, pure, clean C# code is generated for: domain classes (tables and views), request/result/response classes for stored procedures (where applicable), domain query classes, repository classes, and mapping methods between the object and the database. Mapping uses pure ADO.NET in a proper and generic manner; deviations from standard behavior (parameter types, SQL dialect, etc.) are delineated on a connection type basis and are selected and used at runtime transparently. The code that is subsequently generated supports SQL Server 2000+, SQL CE 4.0, SQLite (Mono.Data.Sqlite AND System.Data.SQLite) at runtime. All that is needed is to change the target database is to edit the application configuration (app.config, web.config, or see how to use Android preferences in our samples): change the connection string (connectionStrings/add/@connectionString in app.config/web.config) and the (assembly qualified) connection type (connectionStrings/add/@ providerName in app.config/web.config). Viola! A functioanly data layer. Classes are generated as partial for customization while being re-generatively safe. Of course, there is trade-offs in this approach: we value clean, debuggable, performant data access layers over the alternative; you do not get LINQ support (yet), dynamic queries, joins/projections, and if there are custom logic needed, then you have to customize the generated code. The applications thast the development team develops need speed and the lack of some of the missing conveniences other frameworks offer is known and understood. As this tool matured, adding support for a mobile platform underscored the necessity for clean, debuggable, performant data access code. The prior work and holding to philosophy paid off: TextMetal supporting MfA generates fast data code AND baseline view XML code simply and easily. If you would like to learn more about TextMetal and its support for Mono for Android 1.9, grab a copy of the source code suing Git and build it in Visual Studio 2010 or MonoDevelop 2.6 from its project web site: http://code.google.com/p/textmetal/ Various sample projects of real applications in production (desktop, web, mobile) can be found in the 'samples' Git repository. Feel free to suggest improvements and submit bug reports using the Issues tool on the project web site. Enjoy! Daniel Bullington, TextMetal project founder
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