@cowgaR, I'm a little confused about your comment regarding us not liking questions about the competition. We always answer those queries and our forums should show that. If, for whatever reason, you believe you have asked a question and not had it answered then I can assure you it's not from us stonewalling any mention of competitors. In fact, we generally encourage questions regarding our competitors because often it makes us look even better however we're also honest when we believe an alternative will better suit a customer - it's simply not worth letting somebody down and the support cost of trying to push a square peg into a round hole just to get a sale. I'm sure many of our competitors operate in a similar manner.

I think we deleted one spam link, once, to a competitors website but that was for one of our WPF products, not LightSpeed.

I kicked the post on Chris's blog because it already had one kick, I thought he had a good point, and yes - it was positive about us. I don't think that should surprise anyone, surely?

Most LightSpeed related posts on DNK come from our blog, we do post DNK links on the bottom and many of our subscribers kick them when they see them. I've had this discussion before, it's hardly a fault of our own if our users like what we write and kick it but it happens. I suggested last time this was noticed that perhaps it would be wise to implement an improved ranking system for what makes the homepage or boost the kick count required.

@robconery I'm not sure what your comment is entirely in reference to but my guess would be to the dashCommerce product and its need to scale. Given LightSpeed has been implemented in some very very large systems (thousands of tables, millions of rows) and performs exceedingly well (including being one of a couple of O/R Mappers that passes Mats Challenge) I'm sure you're not calling out our ability to scale! Your comment comes across somewhat condescending - just because he didn't rate Subsonic is no need to be impolite. I suggest you establish how you could improve, make the changes and repeat rather than being rude.

John-Daniel Trask
Co-Founder
Mindscape

senfo - it was released formally around then however you could use earlier in beta and ctp forms. You'll notice that WPF came into existence around the start of 06 based on the graph of search frequency and it was known as Avalon before that time.

LOL!

@gazelem67

Not sure you read the post but that your disagreement is covered in it - it's not saying you should keep you head in the sand, in fact it goes on to express the importance of keeping at the front of the curve in order to know when it's a good time to move up. Most of your comment is reflected in the post.

As for absolute principals, nothing is ever absolute - there is always a time when a different principal will apply (e.g. - what if your business is built on using the cutting edge 24-7 as a point of difference?). Providing an opinion on a blog is somewhat the point of a blog, not every post has to be a "how to achieve x with technology y" :-)

Great analogy however!

- JD

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.debuggerstepthroughattribute.aspx

The DebuggerStepThrough attribute is also useful for aiding development when you don't necessarily want to step into certain internal methods.

Simoneb, I can see your point regarding features - most of the time our posts are how to do xyz with LightSpeed, this one is a release which does have additional implications in how it gets kicked up. The post does actually detail quite a bit how to use the new features so has some value beyond linking to just a "buy now" page.

Cheers for your comments too simonech.

- JD

I tend to push any post I make on our blog be it release related or code related and by letting people know that we have (be it with the buttons on our blog that you provide or by word of mouth to them) helps us and helps dotnetkicks by adding to the user base. I've found a lot of value in dotnetkicks and visit regularly and think it's a great resource for all .net developers. Our tools are for developers and therefore our customers are the target audience for this site.

It is pleasing though to see that you're vigilant in trying to ensure a fair system. Lesson learnt - I won't include links to the site in future mail outs.

Apologies guys,

- JD

Cheers for the comment Gavin :)

I'm not sure that just because somebody is new that they're necessarily there to rig it. We sent an email out to customers who have previously purchased LightSpeed that included a link to the story. I understand you're not wanting to have people just join to spam but occasionally you would see people join to kick something (surely people don't join not to kick things?).

Anyway, apologies for causing concern.

Cheers,

John-Daniel

Hi Duckie,

I tend to agree that some level of generation would be nice when you are starting out with a domain model and it is something we are thinking about doing. One thing we want to do is ensure that our road map is defined by user demand rather than arbitrarily adding features and hoping people want them so your feedback is important.

One point I would like to make however is that LightSpeed is not simply enabling the creation of DAL. While it does take care of the persistence story it is designed for building rich domain models, not rubber stamped data access. On smaller systems this can sometimes appear to be a non-obvious difference but once your create a rich domain model with behaviors you quickly run into issues with generation - you can spend more time updating your generation scripts than you might just refactoring your domain model (this applies to generation in general, I'm not targeting any specific product here).

With LightSpeed is that there is so little code you actually need to maintain it's sometimes surprising for new user. You literally inherit off a class and create your fields. Then you are effectively done so generation won't be creating all to much for you. Generating even those initial classes could still be useful however, especially for new users of LightSpeed.

Not everybody wants to create a domain model however and in that case, sure, LightSpeed might not be for you. There are no silver bullets :)

Hope that helps,

- John-Daniel

Hi Duckie,

Thanks for your comment - LightSpeed differs from SubSonic in many ways, it is not a generator for starters and the approach taken to many aspects of the domain modeling is different overall.

Convention-over-configuration, in my opinion, is a feature given it is so rare to find frameworks that actually have sensible defaults (or defaults at all). By applying conventions rather than requiring developers to understand complex configuration we enable developers to get up and running much faster than they otherwise might - something very similar to what you would find with RoR.

You can download and try LightSpeed and see for yourself what it has to offer to learn more.

Hope that helps,

- John-Daniel