Which is better custom Business Objects or DataSets?

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Relaxin - 14 Apr 2007 12:09 GMT

I'm an ex. Borland CO++ Builder developer and I'm trying to get my head
wrapped around MS data concepts.
Borland's concepts were far more easy and had proper UI and data separation
out of the box.
You didn't have to have all of this "hard-coded" structures in order for
data-bound/business side objects to work, Borland's
solutions were far more dynamic.

From what I can see MS requires you to write a lot of custom code and
solutions to provide proper separation.

In working with the typed Dataset it seems to generate a ton of code per
Dataset and causes serious application bloat if you are creating a large
application (800+ tables).

I've never been a fan of products that self generated code for the
developers, because it seemed fragile and if the vendor decided to
add/change functionality your existing code would be broken (i.e. .NET 1.1->
2.0)

I've started to create my own custom Business Objects (BO) and I
"understand" how to do it, but I'm not sure if this is the correct direction
to go.

I really would like to go back to Borland but, I left Borland because the
company seems unsure if they want to stay in the IDE business plus the
quality of their products have really been going down hill for years.

So I must get a clear understanding of the MS way and place Borland out of
my mind.

Thanks

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RobinS - 15 Apr 2007 07:58 GMT

Sorry about the Borland thing. It's very disappointing when you have a job
you like and the company kind of goes south. I learned programming with
Borland's Turbo Pascal ever so many years ago, so I hate to see them
falter.

You didn't say if you were doing C# or VB.

Check out Deborah Kurata's book "Doing Objects in VB2005". It shows how to
set up your 3-layer app with business objects, how to data bind them, how
to populate them, how to udpate them, etc. It really helped me a lot, and I
write all my business apps that way now.

It's a very pragmatic book, and showed some nifty stuff in VS2005 as well
(like code snippets and user settings). You end up actually building a
small MDI app, including the data backend.

Even if you do C#, you can probably figure it out, except the Settings
stuff, which I haven't figured out how to do in C# yet.

I like BO because it segregates the UI from the DAL so well, and my UI
doesn't rely on my data structures. I also like that if I want to put a Web
front-end on my WinForm apps, I can just add another UI, and use the BL and
DAL I've already written. (Or so goes the theory. ;-)

Good luck.
Robin S.
------------------------

> I'm an ex. Borland CO++ Builder developer and I'm trying to get my head
> wrapped around MS data concepts.
[quoted text clipped - 28 lines]
>
> Thanks

Reply to this Message

Relaxin - 15 Apr 2007 09:22 GMT

> Sorry about the Borland thing. It's very disappointing when you have a job
> you like and the company kind of goes south. I learned programming with
> Borland's Turbo Pascal ever so many years ago, so I hate to see them
> falter.
>
> You didn't say if you were doing C# or VB.

I'm using C#.

> Check out Deborah Kurata's book "Doing Objects in VB2005". It shows how to
> set up your 3-layer app with business objects, how to data bind them, how
> to populate them, how to udpate them, etc. It really helped me a lot, and
> I write all my business apps that way now.

I realy hate VB, but I'll take a look at the book :)

Thanks

Reply to this Message

RobinS - 15 Apr 2007 18:39 GMT

You can hate VB6, but VB.Net and C# are like non-identical twins -- the
same underneath, but a little different on the surface. There are actually
a couple of things you can do in VB that you can't do in C#, and vice
versa, but they are very minor. For the most part, both languages do the
same thing; the primary differences are syntax. For that, I offer you this,
which has helped me more than I can say in my transition from VB.Net to C#:

http://www.harding.edu/USER/fmccown/WWW/vbnet_csharp_comparison.html

I think going from C# to VB is easier than going the other way. VB is more
verbose, so to me it is easier to understand. I know other people feel
differently about it, so please don't flame me or start a huge discussion
about it.

If I ever have time, I'm going to rewrite Deborah's sample code in C#, but
I just don't seem to have time these days. I have actually implemented it
in my own applications in C# (I like VB but the company I work for likes
C#).

Good luck.
Robin S.
--------------------------

>> Sorry about the Borland thing. It's very disappointing when you have a
>> job you like and the company kind of goes south. I learned programming
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
>
> Thanks

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Which is better custom Business Objects or DataSets?

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