Home of BoB.NET© (Business object Builder.NET)

Programmers face many tasks throughout the process of creating an application. Some of these tasks are interesting, but the vast majority of a programmer’s day-to-day tasks are extremely repetitive. This is especially true of the tasks involved in interfacing an application to a database. We find ourselves writing the same code over and over again. This wouldn’t be so terrible, except that the database interface tier of an application is not only repetitive but also complicated. Thus, we end up doing rote work, but with a decent chance of a tier that doesn’t work correctly. However, since most applications that we are tasked to create require a database tier, we really have no choice but to trudge through it, spending perhaps 25% of our development time creating basically the same code over and over.

In addition, most good programs are built using a tier of code between the low-level database objects, and the presentation layer of the application. This is most often referred to as the business layer or tier. Its main function is to provide an interface between the relational pattern of the database, and the object pattern of the application, isolating the database layer from the user or presentation layer or tier, and also isolating the presentation layer from the database functionality. In the industry, this is normally referred to as an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) layer. There are as many ORMs as there are developers, and a large number of ORMs that are written leave much to be desired, as not every developer has the necessary skill set to produce a good ORM. So we end up writing the same code here again over and over. The business layer usually requires another 25% of our development time creating, and accounts for probably 50% of the bugs found during testing.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s time to put a stop to this, and maybe let developers have what passes for a normal life.

BOB is an attempt to remove most of this burden from the developer. It is fundamentally a preprocessor, which will create the database tier, and a very large portion of the business tier, for the vast majority of a developer’s day-to-day applications. It is not meant to be a solution for every programming task, but for the 80% or so of applications that we produce which involve retrieving data from the database, adding, modifying or editing data, and saving that data back, this application will automate the production of most or all of the database and business layer code.

As of this release, this program is designed to work with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. It is designed to work with SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008. More databases may be added in a later version. It uses no third party code or controls of any kind.


BoB.NET is presently in the final stages of beta testing, and I expect to be releasing it to the general public sometime in early March of 2010..