Alachisoft polishes tool for .Net object-to-relational mapping

Alachisoft  is shipping an upgrade to its.Net developer tool that the company says offers a nearly 50 percent reduction in application development times.

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TierDeveloper 5.1 is an object-to-relational mapping and code-generation tool that maps objects to relational tables, generates .Net components for VB.Net and C#, and enables embedding of SQL. Developers also can generate ASP.Net and Windows Forms applications that work with generated objects.

"Basically, it cuts down their development time by almost 50 percent," said Iqbal Khan, director of sales and marketing at Alachisoft. Developers are saved from having to write nearly 10,000 lines of code pertaining to business and data objects, he said.

TierDeveloper captures information about database interactions and puts it into objects; .Net code is generated in either C# or VB.Net. "[Developers] save tons of time. They don't have to go through that tedious, painful process of writing code, debugging it, testing it, and all of that. They get that instantly," Khan said.

"Something that would typically take them four to eight weeks, they can do that in a day or two," Khan said.

New in Version 5.1 is integration with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 tools platform, the .Net Framework 2.0, and SQL Server 2005 database, all of which were released by Microsoft in November. Object-relational mapping and application generation also have been enhanced. 

TierDeveloper is available in both Professional and Enterprise Editions. The Professional Edition, with basic object-relational mapping, costs $395 per developer. The Enterprise product, priced at $1,495 per developer, adds template customization and support for the Oracle and DB2 databases as well as integration with the Alachisoft NCache product. NCache, which must be purchased separately, boosts .Net application performance.

A free, 60-day evaluation version of TierDeveloper 5.1 also is offered.