Negm's blog

Sculpture 2.0 RC Release

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:54:00 +0000

Sculpture 2.0 RC is now available for download.

New Features:

· New Molds:

o CSLA Mold.

· Search Bar in the CRUD Pages.

· Some bug fixes in the rest of Molds.

New Tutorials:

In the Mini Videos section there are two new Videos:

1. Build Your CRUD in 6 minutes.

2. Build the CSLA Project Tracker library in 5 minutes.

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

Finnaly Sculpture 2.0 with the new look has been shipped

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:18:00 +0000

Finnaly Sculpture 2.0 with the new look has been shipped

Watch the video tutorials and we wait your feedback.

Building amazing business application using Sculpture 2.0 (Part 2 of 4)

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:53:00 +0000

The second part of our series

Part 1: Model your database and data access layer.
Part 2: Model your service or business layer.
Part 3: Model you user interface layer.
Part 4: Sculpture environment capabilities.

your feedback is greatly appropriated.

Building amazing business applications using Sculpture 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:04:00 +0000

From our new Sculpture 2.0 video tutorials we publish the first part from the new series "Building amazing business applications using Sculpture 2.0"
the series contains:

Part 1: Model your database and data access layer.
Part 2: Model your service or business layer.
Part 3: Model you user interface layer.
Part 4: Sculpture environment capabilities.

Only the first part is available now, but we are working in the rest of parts.
Sculpture 2.0 will be released after we finish its tutorials.

Thanks for your patient.

Sculpture 2.0 Beta Schedule

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Sat, 30 May 2009 20:07:00 +0000

We apologize for delaying Sculpture 2.0 Beta.
And it will be published at the mid of June.

Sculpture 1.0 Final was released, Sculpture 2.0 begins the road

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:05:00 +0000

I am happy to announce that Sculpture 1.0 Final was released. It is quite similar to the beta 2.

Main changes are:
1. Eliminating the installation problems (One installation for all Sculpture components).
2. Fixing all issues about the generation of WCF & ASMX service proxy.

Some colleges will ask:

Oops that’s all what you are doing for 3 months (Since beta 2 released)??

But I can give them a short answer for now: Actually no, we spend most of time designing the next generation of Sculpture (Sculpture 2.0) which we expect that it will be a revolution in the model driven development industry.

A lot of things come to the table that I will blog it in detail in a dedicated series. Some Snippets:
1. Sculpture model comes with two modes, Platform independent mode and Platform specific mode.
2. New “Golden Molds” (Premium Molds):
In Data Source Layer: Database Molds supports SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle. All these databases will support iterative experience between the model and the database without blowing your data so the development agility will be increased.
In Data Access Layer: Molds support full ORM with Entity framework and NHibernate (Mapping entity to more than one table, Mapping table to more than one entity, Conditional Mapping, Complex types, Inheritance …)
In Presentation Layer: (Which the actual revolution) Molds that support true UI Modeling, which gives you the ability to model all of your UI Components not only the CRUD ones.
3. A lot of enhancement in the designer to facilitate the modeling process.
4. Premium support will be available.
5. All existing molds and the Sculpture itself will still free and open source.
6. Migration from 1.0 to 2.0 will be totally kept in mind (so do not worry, all of your work with Sculpture 1.0 will be alive forever).

That’s a brief summary of our thoughts (till now) about sculpture 2.0 (Of course your suggestions are welcomed).

About the schedule for Sculpture 2.0 (approximately):
Sculpture 2.0 Beta at Mid of May 2009.
Sculpture 2.0 Final at Mid of June 2009.

Let’s return to Sculpture 1.0 Final ;) you can download it from here.

New remote member in Sculpture team

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:04:00 +0000

I am happy to announce that a new member joined Sculpture Team.
John dougherty from New Jersey is the first remote member to build our first distributed development environment.

I hope that Sculpture becomes an added value to John as am definitely sure that John will be added value to it.

All Sculpture team welcome John and pleased for our cooperation.

Silverlight & WPF Skins

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:23:00 +0000

While we develop Silverlight & WPF Molds in Sculpture we build a complete skins for them, I extracted them from the project so the users can use it directly without installing Sculpture .

Silverlight Skin: We migrate corrinab Skin to Silverlight 2, adding skin for the grid and combo box.

WPF Skin: We enhance Family Show Skin, adding skin for the new WPF grid, and new skin for the menu.

Download the whole WPF project from here.
Download the whole Silverlight project from here.

Notes:

Installing Sculpture is not required to run the samples.

Just run the DBScript.sql into empty database and change the connection string.

Sculpture 1.0 Beta2 has been shipped

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:45:00 +0000

No new words i can write here, just watch the new screencasts and judge by your self!!

Sculpture Home Page

Sculpture at MSDN Architecture Center Downloads

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:49:00 +0000

Sculpture beside great projects, Another testimonial from Microsoft.
Visit it here.

Sculpture 1.0 Beta 2 in the Oven!!

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:03:00 +0000

The next release of sculpture (Beta 2) will make Sculpture floating on the surface of the ocean presents its potentials in the Model-Driven development by generating a user interface from the Models, More abstraction implemented in the model elements to facilitate the model configuration phase, and our present in this release is the Sculpture Starter Kit to start Sculpture project with all layers in no time.
We fix all known issues in the engine and the published Molds, We employee the modular design of sculpture to produce more and more Molds, and give new facilities while designing the model.
Let’s explore the main changes in Beta 2 by some screen shots:

Yes, All of that will be released in less than month!!!

Testimonial From Jezz Santos-Microsoft to Sculpture

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:52:00 +0000

Last day i received an email from Jezz Santos (Principal Product Development Consultant at Microsoft) as a replay to my request to him to review and evaluate Sculpture.
I read the email with a big smile, and i want to share it with you.

Email Contents:

Dear Sculpture Team,

Thank you for the opportunity to review Sculpture.
Although I have not had a chance to install and operate it, it does look from the outset to be an exciting project, and one that appears to have created a valuable set of architectural assets and framework for as a basis for MDD and automation integration.

I wish you the best of luck on its adoption, evolution and future successes.

Regards

We are proud of these words from one who presents a lot to Microsoft and Software Factories.

Thank you Jezz, and we will work hard and smart to put sculpture as a big step in the MDD track.

Upgraded Molds for Sculpture.

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:23:00 +0000

Thanks for all contributors in the codeplex Issue tracker who report about some issues in the MoldBase & SQL Server Mold. We fix these issues in two drops:

'MoldBase 14-9-08' Includes many bug fixes for issues in the 1.0 Beta release, along with a number of functional improvements.
'SQL Server Mold 14-9-08' Includes many bug fixes for issues in the 1.0 Beta release, along with supporting SQL Server 2000.

Its highly recommend that anyone using Sculpture 1.0 Beta upgrade its 'MoldBase' to MoldBase 14-9-08 & 'SQLServerMold' SQL Server Mold 14-9-08.

Sculpture 1.0 Beta is available

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 13:25:00 +0000

Sculpture 1.0 Beta is available now for download,

This release is the first formal release of sculpture that contains all the feature we planned for 1.0 final.

We hope that this release satisfy your needs, and we wait your comments and suggestions.

In the next versions we will be more accurate in the delivering time.

Download the release from here.

'Sculpture 1.0 beta' within one week

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:02:00 +0000

Am happy to announce that Sculpture 1.0 beta will be shipped in one week, sorry for being late, but we trying hardly to deliver the best.
The last formal definition of sculpture as below:

What is Sculpture?
Sculpture is a .NET open source Model-Driven Development code generation framework ideal for creating and managing .NET Enterprise Applications.
With Sculpture you can model your application components, and then transform this model to deployable components for your favorite technology.
Sculpture comes with a host of ready-made Molds (The word “Molds” come from Molding) like (DAAB, NHibernate, LINQ, WCF, ASMX, SQL Server, MYSQL …).
Sculpture contains a Guidance Package for building your own Mold or customizes existing ones. If you have a custom architecture, using this Guidance Package, you can build a custom code generator with your favorite Technology to fit your needs.
Sculpture can generate any kind of text output using templates (source code, database scripts, web pages, XML, configuration files, etc.).
Sculpture raises the level of abstraction, for example the data access layer part in your model may be transformed to NHibernate implementation and with minor changes it can be transformed to LINQ implementation, and in the future can be transformed to “X” framework, which we don’t know it now.

Sculpture is divided into:
Sculpture Core Engine: it is a platform that hosts the molds, takes care of making all the Molds work together. It includes the Model Designer, Mold discovery and loader, generic validation engine, generic code generation engine, command holder, and editor controls holder.
Mold: The primary plug-in of the Sculpture framework, with Molds you can extend all the power of Sculpture to manage the model and the produced code as your needs, Molds provide the ability to process model elements.

The power of Sculpture comes from its Molds, when you develop Mold, you have the ability to:
1. Add new properties to the model elements, these properties will be shown in the Sculpture property window, so the user can set values for these dynamic properties, for example you can add property called “Table Name” to the Entity Element.
2. Add new validation to the model, you might need to set additional validations to your model, so when the user validates the model, the core engine calls the validation methods for all plugged Molds.
3. Add property monitor, which can be used to monitor any changes to the model elements, and notify the mold when property of specific element type changed, for example you can change the new property “Table Name”, when the entity name changed.
4. Add command set which will appear in the top of the tool window that hosts the editor controls, with these commands you can made any changes to the model, for example you can add command that adds elements to the model based on specific database.
5. Add user control editor to the model, with this user control you will notify when selection changed, so you can build your editors that can be used to simplify the access of model elements.
6. The last one is the template, the mold contains list of templates, and each template has some properties as (Output Pattern, Output Condition, Overwrite …), these properties configure how the engine will transform it.

Ready-made Molds:
• For Data Source Layer:
1. SQL Server.
2. MYSQL.
• For Data Access Layer:
1. DAAB (Data Access Application Block).
2. NHibernate.
3. LINQ to SQL.
• For Service Layer:
1. Service Library.
2. ASMX (ASP.NET Web Service).
3. WCF (Windows Communication Foundation).

Why Sculpture?
• Sculpture raises the level of abstraction so the solution separated from the implementation technology.
• Sculpture gives you permanent preview to your Application, the model can be updated easily in any application life cycle phase, and see the reflections of these changes immediately.
• Sculpture is not depending on (Database + Templates) to generate your CRUD operation, but with Sculpture you model your custom service layer and your business logic, so your code is so closed to how you configure the model. For example in the data access layer you do not want a delete operation for a specific entity, and need a custom method that do other actions, in most code generators, you are being forced to have all CRUD operations for entities.
• Sculpture should not force you to adhere to a specific architecture.
• SQL Server Mold has reverse engineering engine that parses the database and translates it to model, so you can start your project from Database, additionally any updates in the database schema can reflect on the model easily without losing any metadata.
• The generated code follows Microsoft best practice.
• Ready-to-use Molds for common enterprise architectures (DAAB, NHibernate, LINQ, WCF, ASMX, SQL Server, MYSQL).
• Sculpture depends on Templates so you can customize it to get maximum profit.
• Sculpture has its validation engine where the model can be validated, that will decrease the cost of fetching errors (with Molds you can write custom validations to the Model).
• Sculpture developed by Domain-Specific Language (DSL), so:
o It integrates with visual studio.
o No need for any external tool.
o Very easy to use and understand the whole development cycle.
o Familiar by all .NET developers.
• Sculpture should not be all-or-nothing, for example you can use Sculpture to generate only some reports in your development process.
• Sculpture developed by professional team belongs to Dawliasoft, there will be a full support in the discussion and issue tracker, and a premium support will be available in the near future.
• Sculpture provides a comprehensive Help (Videos, and Documentation), which can be used as quick start, and to get the overall structure of the framework.

Sculpture - The New Vision

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:17:00 +0000

After 1 month from publishing the CTP version of Sculpture, and some wide discussions with group of architects and developers, we collect great feedback about the current state and the future of sculpture.
Here I will draw a clear picture about the new vision of sculpture.
Sculpture with the current version is powerful tool but very restricted, from the model elements to its properties to validations to templates, all of that in one package, so you must use Sculpture as it is, no flexibility available, we will not spend our time in discussion the shortage points of the current version of Sculpture, let’s talk about the new one.

Sculpture Definition:
Sculpture is a .NET open source Model-Driven Development code generation framework ideal for creating and managing .NET Enterprise Applications, with Sculpture you can model your application components, and then transform this model to deployable components for your favorite technology, Sculpture comes with a host of ready-made Molds (The word “Molds” come from Molding) like (DAAB, NHibernate, LINQ, WCF, ASMX, SQL Server, MYSQL …), Sculpture also contains a Guidance Package for building your own Mold or customize existing ones. Using this Guidance Package, you can build a custom code generator with your favorite Technology. All of these raise the level of abstraction, for example the data access layer part in your model may be transformed to NHibernate implementation and with minor changes it can be transformed to LINQ implementation, and in the future can be transformed to “X” framework, which we don’t know it now.

Sculpture is divided into:

* Sculpture Core Engine: it is a platform that hosts the molds, takes care of making all the Molds work together. It includes the Model Designer, Mold discovery and loader, generic validation engine, generic code generation engine, command holder, and editor controls holder.

* Mold: The primary plug-in of the Sculpture framework, with Molds you can extend all the power of Sculpture to manage the model and the produced code as your needs, Molds provide the ability to process model elements, mold is not another definition of the templates.

With Mold you can:

1. Add new properties to the model elements, these properties will be shown in the Sculpture property window, so the user can set values for these dynamic properties, for example you can add property called “Table Name” to the Entity Element.
2. Add new validation to the model, you might need to set additional validations to your model, so when the user validates the model, the core engine calls the validation methods for all plugged Molds.
3. Add property monitor, which can be used to monitor any changes to the model elements, and notify the mold when property of specific element type changed, for example you can change the new property “Table Name”, when the entity name changed.
4. Add command set which will appear in the top of tool window that host the editor controls, with these commands you can made any changes to the model, for example you can add command that adds elements to the model based on specific database.
5. Add user control editor to the model, with this user control you will notify when selection changed, so you can build your editors that can be used to simplify the access of model elements.
6. The last one is the template, the mold contains list of templates, and each template has some properties as (Output Pattern, Output Condition, Overwrite …), these properties configure how the engine will transform it.

With this vision you can use the Out-of-the-box Molds, or build your own mold that serves your custom needs.

This is a quick overview of the new vision of Sculpture; we are planning to produce a release at the end of July.

Thanks to all advisors who provided invaluable assistance in this new vision!!

DSL Editor Powertoy in VS2008

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:32:00 +0000

It’s pleasure to Sculpture team to announce that they succeeded in migrating DSL Editor Powertoy to VS2008,

So you can develop DSL projects with DSL Editor Powertoy in VS2008 as the same manner as VS2005 with full functionality (Guidance Package , Editor Configuration Diagram).

This release of DSL Editor Powertoy works identically as the previous one.

Note: It’s not an official release, but Sculpture Team believes that DSL Editor Powertoy is vital for all DSL Designers, so they try to provide a community version that supports VS2008.

We hope it will be useful for all DSL Editor Powertoy users.

Downloads:
DSL Editor Powertoy 2008 Binary Installer (1.37 MB)
DSL Editor Powertoy 2008 Source Code (6.08 MB)

For more information about migrating your DSL project to Visual Studio 2008 see the previous post (DSL from 2005 to 2008)

Second CTP version for Sculpture

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:36:00 +0000

A new version of sculpture published on codeplex.

In this version:
• Many bug fixes, along with a number of functional improvements.
• Support for Visual Studio 2008.
• Some improvements in the Power Point presentation (add a section that describes how to consume the generated code).
• Remove the topics related to Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 from the version that work under VS2005, so it can be run under .NET Framework 2.0.

You can download it form here

Surviving with DSL Editor PowerToy in Visual Studio 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:22:00 +0000

As I described in The last post (DSL from 2005 to 2008) that the last problem face us while migrating Sculpture to VS2008 was DSL Editor PowerToy, still does not supported in VS2008, I hope to see new version soon.

First I must declare our idea about Surviving with DSL Editor PowerToy in Visual Studio 2008
• We already build our DSL editors in the VS2005 version.
• We just want the framework to be running under Visual studio 2008.
• We don’t need the DSL Editor PowerToy guidance package or even the DSL Editor PowerToy Diagram.

The first point is about including the DSLEditors folder to your project, set the custom tool for all DSL Editor templates to none (the code is already generated in VS2005 we don’t need the templates).

The second point is about the references, When you add a DSL Editor PowerToy to your DSL project by its guidance package there are four new references added to the DSLPackage project, we have to convert the corresponding projects to these DLLs to VS2008 so it can be a replacement of the previous dlls, we download the source code of DSL Editor PowerToy and convert these four projects to VS2008, some reference problems fixed then we build the projects and get the new dlls, add references to these dlls in your DSLPackage project, it work fine.

The third and last point is about Commands, which converted from CTC to XML with extension VSCT in VS2008 as we discussed in the previous post. Fortunately the DSL Editor PowerToy Command.ctc file does not have a big change from project to another, so you can use the following one with minor changes.

You can download the DLLs and Commands XML file from here.

Conclusion:
If you have DSL project in VS2005 that include DSL Editor PowerToy, you can run it under VS2008 by the next steps:
1. Include the DSLEditor folder in your DSLPackage project.
2. Set the custom tool property for all the templates in this folder to none.
3. Download the new dlls and CustomCmd.vsct from here.
4. Add references to these dlls in your DSLPackage project.
5. Add the downloaded CustomCmd.vsct to Commands.vsct.
6. Run and enjoy with your Editors run on VS2008.

DSL from 2005 to 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:54:00 +0000

Spending 2 days for migrating Sculpture from VS2005 to VS2008 is unexpected time, we expect that we will convert it by the Visual Studio 2008 wizards, and then press F5 to test the framework.

I shocked when I read the article that shipped with Visual Studio SDK 2008 tell us:
“To migrate your project from VS2005 to VS2008 Create a new solution and copy your code files to it”

Its ok we follow the guide and migrate the project, some problems face us while converting that take some time to fix it, I want to explain these problems here to avoid the readers from take the same time.

1. VS2008 don’t copy the DLLs to GAC during the debugging mode, that’s great new feature but let us confused a little to be familiar with this new manner, the problem that if you have a copy of the dsl.dll and dslpackage.dll in your GAC, the debugging mode will run from them neglecting any other version on your machine, so you update the code and build then run and nothing change, so you must keep in mind that never debug your DSL project while you have a version installed in the GAC.

2. Commands, which converted from CTC to XML with extension VSCT, consuming some time to be familiar with this new format, we try Perl script [ConvertCTCToVSCT.pl] but it does not work correctly, where we add the commands by including Header file to the CTC file, so we convert it manually, after some of work it seems nice and easy to work with.
As a short Description about the new format

• To make groups use:
Just change the Group id, and the Parent id to your needs

• To Make Buttons use:

• The final thing you must know Symbols, where each of the previous IDs (groups and buttons) must be set its value in the Symbols section as follow:
Change the “guidCmdSet” value to match the one in your GeneratedVSCT.vsct file.

3. The last problem face us while migrating to VS2008 was DSL Editor PowerToy, still does not supported in VS2008, I hope to see new version soon, I will discuss how we overcome this problem in a dedicated post to be available for all DSL Editor PowerToy lovers.

Model Your Life Series

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:06:00 +0000

I think that any isolated framework likes a person lives in distant island alone, so I plan to write a set of posts about Sculpture and other .NET Technologies.

How Sculpture as Model driven development can be used to model these technologies?

Through this series I will demonstrate my opinion about the integration points.

Planned topics:

Sculpture & Web Service Software Factory.

Sculpture & LINQ.

Sculpture & .NET Entity Framework.

Sculpture & UI.

Sculpture & Smart Client Software Factory.

Sculpture & Web Client Software Factory.

Sculpture & Mobile Client Software Factory.

Sculpture & Prism.

In the other hand I will post about alternatives code generators as:

Sculpture VS Repository Factory.

Sculpture VS Nettiers.

I hope that I have enough time to complete this series in the near future.

Sculpture 1.0 CTP has been shipped

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:20:00 +0000

Congratulation to all Sculpture’s team.

Sculpture 1.0 CTP has been shipped in www.codeplex.com/Sculpture

This is the first release of Sculpture CTP [29-5-2008], the stable or final 1.0 release will be available within one month.

Here in Dawliasoft we work in agile methods, so we decide to publish weekly CTPs versions till the final one, through these CTPs we will try to fix all known and recent issues.

We awfully need your opinion to put Sculpture in the right way.

Issues, feature requests, or new ideas are welcome.

Sculpture 1.0 CTP closer than you think

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:56:00 +0000

After months of work, in a few days we will announce that Sculpture 1.0 CTP shipped.
So let's take a closer look about what Sculpture produce and the capabilities of these produced components.

1. Business Entities

· Entity class is not simply as just (get & set) it provides with wide functionalities that can help the developers in their work.
· All entities implement INotifyPropertyChanged interface, so can be used in data binding.
· Allow multiple kinds of Collections (List, Collection, and ObservableCollection for WPF).
· Sculpture provides Validation application block Designer for configure validation attributes of the entity's properties with fantastic validation locator to copy validation attributes from one property to another.
· With Sculpture entity you have the ability to:

o Get the Entity State (Added, Changed, And Unchanged).
o Copy Entity data to another one.
o Compare two entities data.
o Get a list of the properties that changed since you get the entity from a data source.

2. Data Access Layer

· Sculpture generates full Data Access Layer with maximum customization.
· Sculpture supports custom data methods, so each entity has its standard methods (GetAll, GetById, Save …) and custom methods.
· With Sculpture Data Access Manager

o You can suspend any of the standard or custom methods.
o You can rename a standard method (so customer.GetAll() can be customer.GetMyCustomers())
o You can set comments for all kinds of methods.o You can copy custom methods from another entity.

· Sculpture Supports options for both stored procedures and inline query for data access, this option can be in the method level, so you can have GetAll method that works with inline query and Save method that call stored procedure.
· While using inline queries the save method updates the changed properties only, so it's more efficient than update the whole entity properties.
· Sculpture Supports saving single entity and collection of entities in one transaction; supports one to many relationships so you can save the customer and his contacts by one line of code.
· Sculpture Supports transactions so you can get the handle of the transaction.
· With InvalidEntityException class that generated by Sculpture, you can know which entity failed to save, and formatted information about the error.

3. Business Logic Layer

· Sculpture provides your applications with sky level view of your business logic components.
· Sculpture generates the skeleton of the business components and business methods.
· Sculpture generates the interface of the business component classes.
· Sculpture gives you the ability to copy the structure of the data access methods (standard and custom) to be business methods, so you can easily wrap the Data Access Layer with Business Components.

4. Stored Procedures script

· Sculpture provides a full script for CRUD stored procedures.
· Sculpture gives you the option to change any CRUD stored procedure name.
· Sculpture uses the stored procedure template of the Repository Factory, so it is mature enough.

5. Database Schema script

· Sculpture Provides a full script of the Database Schema, so all what you need is just to run it in an empty database.

An Early Glimpse of Sculpture

noreply@blogger.com (Ahmed Negm) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:29:00 +0000

Welcome to my blog, and welcome to sculpture, here you will find a technical posts about Software Engineering in general and about Sculpture, I will always post our progress in Sculpture, and other related points.
I hope you find my blog useful, and welcome again.
So Sculpture Sculpture ..., what is Sculpture??

Sculpture is a .NET open source Model-Driven Development code generation framework ideal for creating and managing .NET Enterprise Applications.

Model-Driven Development represents the next logical step forward in software development methods and practices. It aims to facilitate the automatic construction of a software solution from a high-level domain-specific specification. This approach seeks to promote productivity, maintainability, expressiveness, and to aid in the management of complexity by supporting higher levels of abstraction and the systematic reuse of domain-specific assets.(From: Visual Studio 2005: Model-Driven Development of .NET Enterprise Applications), Sculpture(Model you Life) is a new implementation in this track, which you can use for modeling the business entities and the structure of business logic, Based on this model, a code generation framework transports the model to the implementation of the Entities, Data access layer, Business logic layer skeleton, Database stored procedures, and Database Schema for the application.

So with Sculpture you can:

• Design your entities and relationships by drag and drop these elements into the diagram surface.
• Configure your model and entities with bunch of rich UI forms and utilities that facilitate the configuration process.
• Generate C# efficient code and scripts based on Microsoft best practice, no need to modify the generated code because you already customize it in the model.
• If you already have Database, Sculpture give you the ability for translate it to model.

Sculpture Main Features:

Sculpture raises the level of abstraction so the solution separated from the implementation technology.
Sculpture give you permanent preview to your domain model, can easily updated in any application life cycle phase, and immediately see the reflections of these changes.
Sculpture is not depending on (Data Model + Templates) only, (Metadata) that configured in the model is essential part in the generated code, so your code is so closed to how you configure the model.
Sculpture is Domain-Specific Modeling so can be extended to enable full code generation.
Sculpture has reverse engineering engine that parses the database and translates it to model, so you can start your project from Database, additionally any updates in the database schema can easily reflect on the model without losing any metadata.
Sculpture supports Multi-Models in one application, so if your domain model is big, you can split it into more than one model (Modules), and suspends generation of duplicated entities.
Sculpture believes that the software is accumulative, so we does not reinvent the wheel, the generated code follows Microsoft best practice, where Sculpture uses Data Access Application Block (in the data access layer) and Validation Application Block (in entities properties attributes) from Enterprise Library, and we will work hardly to put your application on the top of the cutting edge technologies.
Sculpture depends on Templates so you can customize it to get maximum profit.
Sculpture has its validation engine where the model can be validated, that will decrease the cost of fetching errors.
Sculpture developed by Domain-Specific Language (DSL), so

• It is integrated with visual studio.

• No need for any external tool.

• Very easy to use and understand the whole development cycle.

• Familiar by all .net developers.

Sculpture developed by professional team belongs to Dawliasoft, there is will be a full support in the discussion and issue tracker, and a premium support will be available in the near future.
Sculpture provides a powerful Help that integrated with visual studio, which can be used as quick start, and to get the overall structure of the framework, more documents will be available with the next versions.