Moving from Ruby on Rails to Visual Studio .Net

[GarethHowell]

Hi all Whilst I have done quite a bit of ASP.Net programming in the past, most of my recent development work has been with Ruby on Rails. I'm now starting up a new project that requires ASP.Net and I'm trying to see how to do a couple of the really great features in RoR. The main one is database migrations. In RoR, you have a logical schema for the database tables stored as a series of migrations: each of which contains the changes to up or down the rev level of the database tables. As you develop the models, you add migrations. This makes rapid development involving databases really easy. Does anything similar exists for VS and ASP.Net? I've been through much of the ASP.Net MVC pages but all the othe references I've seen are too micky mouse to see anything useful (i.e. they all deal with local MDF databases rather than a remote SQL Server database). Regards Gareth

=== GarethHowell http://www.elastictime.com

[Dario Solera]

You'd better ask in another forum, at any rate migrations have nothing to do with ASP.NET but they are related to your data access layer. Coming from RoR, you'll find ASP.NET MVC much more familiar than WebForms, but it's just a web framework built on top of .NET. It does not include anything specific for database management, but you can rely on any existing .NET solution. You have several choices: - Entity Framework - Linq2SQL - NHibernate - SubSonic - ect. I have no idea about the first tow, but I think that NHibernate supports migrations. SubSonic supports migrations only when using the SimpleRepository model (basically, no FKs).

If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. - Charlie Brooker My Photos/CP Flickr Group - ScrewTurn Wiki v3

[GarethHowell]

Thanks mate, I'll repost elsewhere, but thanks anyway for the clarification and pointers. Gareth

=== GarethHowell http://www.elastictime.com

[Brady Kelly]

Dario Solera wrote:

SimpleRepository model (basically, no FKs).

What is such a simple repo that it doesn't support FK's? A flat file? :laugh:

[Dario Solera]

Nope, it's just a way to use SQL Server/MySQL. The most important consideration in this case is that FKs are a problem for scalability. Basically, it's a storage pattern that is based on a DBMS because it's convenient, robust and transactions are ACID, but your schema is highly denormalized so that it scales well.

If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. - Charlie Brooker My Photos/CP Flickr Group - ScrewTurn Wiki v3

[Brady Kelly]

Oh, sweet. I've actually created a DB like that. A real one, not my own play ones.