Check out Blinq...

What percentage of web applications would you say fall into the category of glorified View-Add-Update-Delete operations over a database? That is, you have data stored in a database and you want to expose a web front to look at the data in interesting ways (master details, etc) and add/update/delete the content.. Seems like there is tons of information stored in relational database that can make generating those types of web applications MUCH easier.

That is what we have done with the BLinq project...This is effectively a preview of some work we are considering for the next release of the free Visual Web Developer tool in Orcas. It leverages the new LINQ support to get the OR-Mapping then does some very cool page generation stuff.

 

BTW, that is where we get the name... Web Linq.. or Blinq... Can you guess that the developer named it rather than our marketing department ;-)

 

 

Take a look at let us hear what you think!

Microsoft Blinq Prototype

Overview

Blinq is a tool for generating ASP.NET websites for displaying, creating, and manipulating data based on database schema. Just point Blinq at a SQL database and it will create a website with pages that display sorted and paged data, allow you to update or delete records, create new records, and follow relationships between tables in your database. You don't need to write SQL queries to use Blinq; LINQ will generate optimized queries for you that request just the data you want to show. Blinq uses the May LINQ Community Tech Preview to access data. The code Blinq creates is simple and easy to customize to fit your needs. Everything in the website Blinq creates is meant as a starting point for a website that meets your needs perfectly, so have fun customizing the pages, experimenting with the code, and making it yours!

Features

The Blinq tool autogenerates web forms from database schema which enable the following by default:

Select, insert, update, and delete functionality

Details and foreign key navigation

Sorting and Pagination of records

A default style and design which provide a consistent layout