.NET Answers

There are other controls, and I’m sure I could go on talking about them for weeks yet, but we need to move on. Since most modules you build are going to need at least one table behind them, and most of the presentation layer can’t be developed until we have the data access coded, we are going to focus on the “right” way of accessing the tables in your database today.

The first thing you want to do is grab a copy of CodeSmith 2.6.

Now, before you tune out thinking you’ve seen the “How to use CodeSmith to create your Data Access Layer in DotNetNuke” presentation before, trust me. What I’m about to show you is only about 80% of what you’ve seen before. I have a small tweak that will by pass the info classes and use datasets instead. Stay tuned in.

There are more recent versions and you may ultimately want to grab a copy of a newer version, but version 2.6 is free while the more recent ones require that you pay for them. You can get CodeSmith 2.6 at: http://www.codesmithtools.com/freeware.aspx

If you have trouble running CodeSmith, you may need to remove the CodeSmith.exe.config file. This file specifies DLLs that may not be on your computer. I think it was written against .NET 1.0. Everything we need to have work, works if you remove this file. You should probably just rename it so it can’t be found by the application.

The reason you want this program is because we are going to have it write most of our data access layer. To do that, you will need to download and install this zip file into your CodeSmith application directory.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to tell CodeSmith to use that directory. You can do that by clicking the “Create Template Folder Shortcut” button at the top of the CodeSmith application (the open folder button on the left).

Next, we will discuss the ultimate naming convention for our tables and create the SQL scripts we will use to install the final version.

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