I use Codesmith tools, never touched subsonic, so guess which I'm posting about. :)

Codesmith tools is a template engine. You make a template with some inputs and it outputs the template with the variables in place.

I use it EXTENSIVELY in my module development. I have it generate everything I need to just start coding on a module. Including my test project for the module.

It's used to speed up generating identical code. Aside from my own module templates, I use netTiers for my DAL and that uses codesmith [the reason I bought codesmith originally]. It generates a DAL for my entire database without me writing a single line of code. Some of my projects tag upwards of 40 tables, so doing this manually, or writing my own [which I did for a while] isn't nearly as nice or robust as nettiers is.

There are other DAL projects that utilize nettiers to generate the DAL for a given database.

Codesmith also ties into Visual Studio, so it's possible to write small 'snippet' templates that you can run inside visual studio and have the code generated. I'm going to be looking into this soon because of the duplicative nature of a lot of code I do in my code that I can't automate at generation time.

Subsonic looks like it's 'equivalent' to netTiers. Generates a DAL. I like codesmith because it can do more than just a DAL.

hth

Baatezu & Chris,

Thanks so much for responding.  So I think it's safe to say that I may be making it a little harder on myself with module development if I didn't know about the tools that you all just referred me to... would you agree?  At least if I don't want to hand code everything from scratch that is.

Now to my next question...I've got books on DNN module development and in the latest book they have a small image of a module's architecture.  I'm a visual learner and so I recreated the graphic so as to help me understand it better by making each piece.  It may be elementary to do that, but I like to get a conceptual grasp on things before hand and I know how I learn.   See the module architecture/data flow image here. 

As I read the books (and as I watch the demos) I try to align what I'm seeing with where it goes on the chart.  As a beginner, this has not been easy for me to do.  In your posts you said that you use CodeSmith + NetTiers / EntitySpaces for your Data Access Layer.  Can you help me understand what exactly this is providing for you with regards to the files in the module structure?  I know it's generating code based off a template that helps you develop rapidly, but where do you place the code once you get it?  Is it creating your "Concrete Data Provider" as well as your "Abstract Data Provider"?  I'm pretty sure that it is creating your "Controller" class.  Also, am I correct to say that many of these files reside in the Components folder in the module folder hieararchy?

My end goal is to know what code files are provided to you by the ORM/Code gen tools.  I feel like I know what tools are necessary and now I'm trying to figure out where exactly the code that they generate resides within the architecture of a module (the chart image) and also where they are located within the hierarchy of folders that get created from the DNN Starter Kit template. 

Thanks again for any insight.  Your responses are really helpful to me.

Regards,

Clint