Needletail Tools

Different tools that help to build mostly web applications(Asp.Net and Asp.Net MVC), some tools can also be used for windows development.

Pre requisites

To build the source code you will need to add references to the following dlls:

• Microsoft.SqlServer.Types
• Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo.dll
• Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Sdk.Sfc.dll
• Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo.dll
• System.Data.SqlServerCe.dll

DataAccess

A Micro ORM that is fast and easy to use, supports different DBMSs, for now MSSQL and SQLServer CE are fully supported, there is also a version for MySQL that is being tested, read more here.

Usage for DataAccess

Ideal when you need fast access to the database or when you need to change DBMS whitout any hassle, for instance having SQLCE for dev and MSSQL for production.

DataAccess.Migrations

A tool to manage database migrations as part of your application, you can use this tool to initialize migrate and seed the database, very simple to use and understand, read more here.

Usage for Migrations

A good solution for applications running under shared hosting or when you need to manage Database migrations as part of your application.

Needletail.Mvc

Needletail.Mvc allows you to call javascript code anywhere from your MVC project, this is allows you to tell the client(browser) to call some function when an event occurs on the server's code in real time.

Only works with MVC 4 and with browsers that support SSE(sorry, no IE).

Usage for Needletail.Mvc

When you need to execute code on the browser when something happens on the server, the most basic scenario for this, is a chat application, you can read more here

A complete sample

If you want to see what you can do with these libraries, go to the Cloud Wars game page and check the details.

I work at Sciodev and I have used Needletail.DataAccess in some projects, most of the times we use Entity Framework or NHibernate, but some times Needletail.DataAccess was a better fit for the project so we use it.