It truly gives me a great pleasure to announce the release of first final version of Smarties 2008.

You only need to use Smarties 2008 for a short period of time to realise how code development life becomes easier when Smarties 2008 is installed on your machine.

Smarties2008's focus is to speed up your project developments by reducing the amount of coding you need to do. We have aleady covered many of the tedious tasks that you would use in your project developments. With Smarties 2008 you can design your classes in such way that you only could wish for in the past. Imagine this one thing you can do with Smarties 2008... Every single class in your project can be Serializable, Cloneable, and Disposable. These are the most fundemental and common interfaces a class should/can implement as part of the services it exposes to its consumer. You can do this now within 2-3 minutes for each class using Smarties 2008.

Code organisation can tremendously increase your productivity. Once you realise this then you would know why Microsoft introuduced #region directives and why MojabSoftware made every effort to bring this underestimated feature of VS IDE to life. Did you know when you use Regionize Control Block feature of Smarties 2008 it can help you to spot that bug quicker? The concept has already been proven to us many times where we could see the code logic better hence spotted the bug far more quicker.

Smarties 2008 is very unique product that comes with a fresh approach to code organisation and packed with productivity features for diehard coders with a price tag of $50USD that entitles you to install up to two machines for single concurrent use. If you could find a product today that matches what Smarties 2008 can do and cost less to install on two machines I would personally give you a free license of Smarties 2008.

Don't just take my word for it just download a fully functional trial version of Smarties2008 now and see what it can do for you. If you never used similar tools before you will kick yourself for coding all that routine by hand when you could do it with a couple of clicks instead.

Alan Mojab
MojabSoftware's Principal

Smarties 2008 1.1.0 has just been released. 

Once again we've been busy adding more features to Smarties 2008. In this release you would find new time-saving features that any developers should have in his/hers toolbox and few enhancements to increase usability. To make Smarties 2008 even more useful for you we have added features for creating Flat Business Objects and Virtual Business Objects from within the VS IDE at ease.

We have rushed to make this release available to you while we complete the rest of the development. In the next release that is 1.2.0 Oracle will be supported as well as the DAO objects that we've been working on already. The DAO objects are very challenging since Smarties 2008 does not distribute any base types to have a smarter design therefore our goal with DAO would be slightly different. The focus would be to give you something practical and at same time powerful enough if you intend not to use OR/M approach or any other methods that would create dependencies in your project.

The evaluation version of Smarties 2008 has been updated to 1.1.0 so that you can test-drive the new features and enhancements.

Is Smarties 2008 becoming an OR/M?

No, Smarties 2008 focus is on Flat BO/VBO objects only. There will be limited functionality in DAO (Data Access Object) too since Smarties 2008 wouldn't touch FK and PK, if it did then it would become an OR/M.

Why then offering BO/VBO generation capability?

We have had few requests well before RC6 for the exact features where developers wanted to have the ability to generate Flat BO/VBO within VS IDE on the fly. There are few successful commercial and open-source OR/M tools out there. All OR/M tools have their own entity generators that suits the underlying framework they distribute. That means you cannot port the generated entities without porting the framework with them too.

I have over 7,500 hours of OR/M development experience behind me. In this blog I talked about the project that I worked on before Smarties 2008 work had commenced. The project was an OR/M called Business Object Generator. I have now decided to close the project permanently and put my energy and efforts into Smarties 2008 instead. I'd use the exprience or parts of the old project to do something useful with them but not as an OR/M tool.

Regardless you are OR/M hard-core or not you would always find it useful to have the ability to create classes that present database tables or views.

What is Flat BO/VBO?

Entites or Business Objects that represent Database Tables or Views that may or may not have direct interaction with the data store and have no knowledge of FKs or PKs in the database.

Please visit the Version History page for a complete list of changes in version 1.1.0.

See Business Object Generator in action. The link to C# or VB.NET.

I just uploaded 24 new presentation videos to the site. All presentation video have been incorporated with Core Features page for easy viewing.

In this release you would find eight more database engines added to BO/VBO Generator feature of Smarties 2008. Please see the full list of supported database engines below. To compliment BO/VBO Generator a new timesaver command called Extract DTO Class has also been added. Please see the command in action. This new feature would also serve you for creating similar classes using the concept of DTO. Eight enhancements have been made to Smarties 2008 as well plus few bug fixes.

We have decided not to include DAO as part of BO/VBO Generator even though we worked on it for a few days to see what we could do about it without thinking OR/M. As we have stated before Smarties 2008 is not going to be an OR/M but quickly we found that touching DAO would force us to go all the way to OR/M. I'll blog about this more but for now I would like share this with you. Not everyone uses OR/M even though an OR/M's entity generator can do the bulk of work for you by creating the entity classes as well as collection types and so on. What about the developers who don't wish to use OR/M? This is where Smarties 2008 comes to your rescue by generating the flat entities and the collection types with various timesavers options such as Smart Interfaces very qucikly within VS IDE. With a total of nine database engines supported in Smarties 2008 it should make many developers happy to have the capability at their feet.

Database Engine:

• MS SQL Server
• MS SQL CE Edition 3.1 and 3.5
• MS Access
• Oracle
• MySql
• PostgreSql
• Firebird
• Sqlite
• VistaDB

We have also updated the site with new theme to match the mood for spring-summer 

[Edit: 8 April]

I just published an Article about Data Access Objects on my blog. Please read it when you get the time. After all I'm able to do something about the DAO.