I've been pretty quiet over the last month or two on SubSonic matters and hopefully that will change over the next few weeks as my workload lightens a bit and Eric and I find more time to devote to the next release.
The big thing for me has been LINQ and LinqToSql. If you read my blog you know that I've been doing a lot with the toolset - mostly trying to see where the "sweet spots" are and where SubSonic can "fill the void".
Above all, I do NOT want to be in a competitive stance with Microsoft or ASP.NET. It may sound limp, but I have my reasons to work with the toolset, and not against it. This has always (in my mind) been one of the strengths of SubSonic: playing nice with .NET and the MS toolset. I don't want to reinvent and I certainly don't want to suggest that I know better (at least out loud :p). Anything that's part of the platform will almost always be easier to use (even if it's a tad crufty) and for my part, I'd rather we all just get along.
Building 42
I was invited to Redmond (for entirely other, unrelated reasons) this week, and when I arrived yesterday I saw ScottGu in the hallway, bouncing between offices and (literally) holding 3 conversations at once with various people. I said hello and he asked me to wait a second, and then to my surprise he said "hey check this out" and pulled me into his office for an impromptu demo of the new MVC bits (which he'll be showing off at the ALT.NET conference).
I'm not permitted to talk about it (I'm under NDA as and MVP) but I can say it's "The Tits", in every sense of that overused phrase. I'm really impressed with the things going on with ASP.NET. I just hope Phil doesn't screw it up... :)
Roadmap
It's pretty cool being here, seeing what's going on in the Borg Mother Ship :), and it's helped me to setup (what I think) is a pretty neat Roadmap for SubSonic's future. This is preliminary, and I'll put together a more complete picture over the next week or so:
- Rev the Query Engine - I like our query tool and I'm not a huge fan of the LINQ syntax. I think there is definitely a place for the two to co-exist, I have some ideas on how to add in joins, aggregations, logical grouping, and so forth that I think would be a nice complement to LINQ.
- Migrations - Not much to say here - they're going in
- More Controls - I have a few in mind, specifically a databound calendar (built on top of the existing one) that displays information bound to it, etc. More on these later.
- REST/JSON - finish up our REST/JSON Handlers for exposing data remotely
- Generators - Create page templates for creating "scaffoldy" pages to file
- Expanded DB Provider Support - we have a pretty impressive arsenal of DB providers currently, but I want to expand on these while at the same time buffing out support for the ones we have. I know that many of them are not up to where the SQL provider is and it's only for lack of time and commiters - hopefully this will change.
- Integrate JQuery - I love this thing, and I'd love to do some fun UI workings with it (perhaps as controls)
That's about it. If you have some ideas - lemme know!
