Under the Hood: Tools Used on the MAT

But round-tripping was always an issue. Too many times, from a cost perspective, it was easiest to use the modeling tool to do an initial detailed design, then complete coding and testing using the IDE.
We've come a long way in the last ten years or so -- I wouldn't dream of running a large project without extensive modeling tool support. But for projects with just one developer? What kind of tools make sense then? Rose will set you back several thousand bucks, and I'd really rather have a car, vacation, heck anything else besides a cute little icon on my desktop.
So when I was developing version 2.0 of the MAT, I pieced together various tools from around the web, and I'm extremely happy with the way things turned out.
First, Enterprise Architect is the tool to use for modeling -- the price is great, and it supports all kind of stuff that the more expensive tools don't. I created my domain model in EA, then created database scripts for my persistent objects.
And my vote for cool tool of the year goes to CodeSmith, which is a templated code generation tool for .NET. CodeSmtith will even go out to your database and build objects based on your tables, which is sweet.
Rounding out the pack is CSLA, an enterprise framework for your business objects. CodeSmith comes with templates that generate CSLA objects from you tables, and CodeSmith also comes with templates for creating SQL Server stored procedures for all of your CRUD operations.
After a week or so of tweaking, learning, and playing around, now I'm wired for sound. If the code requires a change to the design, I change the model, which automatically updates the tables. Table changes automagically update the stored procs and my business object layer. It takes about 5 minutes from the need to change a field and having working code that uses it. All my business logic is abstracted out in its own layer, and I can focus on UI instead of the wiring. Very sweet indeed.