Ron Conery, who recently joined Microsoft has somehow found time to release a new version of SubSonic, 2.1 in beta.

I have been using SubSonic since the 2.0 release and find it is a really nice OR/M tool for .NET applications. It offers some of the things I find particularly attractive in Ruby on Rails, things like Migrations.

The SubSonic 2.1 beta 1 offers so much more:

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 amount of time on.

Northwind.CustomerCollection customersByCategory = new Select()
.From()
.InnerJoin()
.InnerJoin(Northwind.OrderDetail.OrderIDColumn, Northwind.Order.OrderIDColumn)
.InnerJoin(Northwind.Product.ProductIDColumn, Northwind.OrderDetail.ProductIDColumn)
.Where(“CategoryID”).IsEqualTo(5)
.ExecuteAsCollection();

SubStage

Eric and his secret little project are ready to see the light of day. I’m not sure how to categorize this thing, other than to say it’s a SubSonic Geek’s Best Friend. It’s part IDE, part Help Resource, Part Config tool, part Validator. Eric’s working up a screencast on it now (link to follow) and here are the highlights:

* Load your Web(or App).config and it will load your Database up, with settings
* Work with a GUI when setting your provider bits. Not sure what to use with that naming problem? SubStage will help.
* Validate your DB according our conventions, and see when you have problems right up front. Eric’s built in a complete validation system so if you don’t have a Primary Key on a table, you know it up front.
* View your object’s by Table or Class view. All of your naming and provider settings will be viewable when using our Class View - this way you’ll know your API before it’s generated.
* Generate your DAL using SubStage. Once you have everything set just so, generate the files then drag them from the SubStage Explorer window right into your project
* Work with your data. Eric build a frickin web server into SubStage, and wraps an AutoScaffold around your database so you can, literally, work with your data using our scaffold right there.
* Help… lots of Help. Access our API reference and Forums online, right through SubStage - we’re trying to make this easy for you… can you tell?

These features are great additions to what is already a great set of tools. I plan to post about a project I am working on using the ASP.NET MVC Framework with SubSonic handling my models. This project should be a great jump-off point for readers wanting to get into the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework and not sure what to do about the back end.