Karls Blog

I read on Darrens blog about his tinkering with Blinq. I had downloaded the CTP a few weeks ago, but it had just sat there in my c:\Downloads folder ever since. Since I was having a performance problems with CodeSmith + NetTiers on large DB tables (over 50k rows) on an internal projects for SMSi I decided to install and have a play.

Quick summary of the 'requirements' of this part of the app was a 'web GUI for the production DB'. Oh, it also has to be usable by sales guys and gals so usability is important This is pretty standard stuff, and something we do at WDG quite often, so as always, I was keen to reuse whatever I could instead of reinventing the wheel.

The install was easy - install Linq May CTP, then Blinq - no problemo there. I then literally ran the same command (except for the obvious cmd args) as Darren:

Blinq /t:c:\Projects\smsi\blinq /database:SMSiData /server:. /sprocs

I created a vdir under IIS and opened the site but it was blank! Strange.

So I jumped on the Blinq forums and saw this post about PKs (primary keys) being mandatory. I had created a new DB and copied the data from the exsisting live DB using the SQL 05 Import / Export wizard. That process hadn't created my PKs / FKs so I just backed up / restored the live DB onto my local box, reran the blinq cmd and BAM - I had a web UI to my DB.

It uses master pages / ASP.NET 2.0 templates so a quick email to the creative guys and the new GUI looks even sweeter!

After playing around for bit, I've grown to love this! In literally 90 seconds, I had a FAST, intuative UI for all my DB data. Running SQL Profiler, I checked out some of the cmds being passed to SQL server and they are very neat! Big kudos to the Blinq team! For us, this thing has a lot of merit! Anything that can reduce repetition and have coders working on the 'fun' stuff rather than the 'mundane' stuff is a 'good thing'! I, for one, will be keeping a close eye on Blinqs progress :)

PS - I know there is no Go Live license for Blinq (yet!) so I would class this as a 'internal test production' app ;)