Two new generation tools

Two things well worth investigating coming from Joseph Cooney: m3rlin and Evolve.

m3rlin is a templating code generator that uses ASP.NET style <% %> syntax. It hosts the ASP.NET runtime to perform the code generation. It uses XML as it's source of meta-data. Complete source as well as a binary for framework 1.0 and 1.1 is included, as well as some documentation and a simple demo (generating ASP.NET from SQL Schema in VB). A command-line tool for turning your MS SQL Server 2000 database schema into an XML document is included. It demonstrates a number of techniques including the use of the windows forms property grid and various UITypeEditors, hosting the ASP.NET runtime, and remoting XML documents across appdomains. A command line version is also included.

Evolve is a generation tool developed to work with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and greater. Evolve generates XML documents based on your SQL Server database schema, which you can then transform into different outputs such as

• Documentation
• Data Access Code
• Transact-SQL Code
• User Interface
• XML Schemas

In addition to performing XML generation Evolve has a very simple plugin framework. Plugins can be loaded at run-time to perform post processing of the XML document to create outputs like those mentioned above. The plugin framework also manages saving of plugin properties to a project file, allowing outputs such as code to be reliably re-generated. There are a number of simple plug-ins that have already been written, and more complicated ones are being added.