The Challenge: Improve team productivity and reduce costs

In today's software markets, where custom applications directly compete with lower cost standard software applications and standard applications compete with one another, construction costs and time-to-market are the most crucial technical success factors. Team productivity is the key to reduce both.

The Solution: Model-Driven Code Generation

To improve competitiveness of custom software it is necessary to borrow quality attributes, low cost and short time-to-implementation from standard software. Typically these goals are reached by means of software reuse. However, in the domain of database applications it's important to see that the application model is very specific. Therefore the application must be modeled and reuse has to occur by means of generating executable, quality-assured code from these models.

Key features of tangible architect

With tangible architect, the model-driven code generator for .NET Database Applications you can boost your teams productivity dramatically and achieve more with less man-hours. With tangible architect you can

• Generate critical elements - Business Objects and the Database Schema - from a Model
• Envision and communicate using any media: UML, C# Interfaces or Wizards
• Leverage Data-Binding to develop complex User Interfaces rapidly
• Build easy-to-deploy applications with a royalty free runtime
• Work highly efficient and effective in micro-teams as well as in large teams

Features

tangible architect generates a persistent object model
Generated Persistent Object Models offer the following advantages:

Working Persistent Object Models are generated from UML or C# Interfaces
This way your model is a live artifact that accurately reflects the system's current state of development. tangible architect generates the implementation of business objects - Not only stubs! This saves you valuable time and money. With tangible architect up to 70% of the code of an average application can be generated automatically. This includes data access, data-binding and parts of the business logic.

O/R Mapping - Error-prone SQL programming is not necessary
The translation of tables into objects is taken care of for you automatically. Error-prone SQL programming is no longer required.

Clear and intuitive structure for your system - directly derived from the model
Every developer knows how to navigate a Microsoft Office Application's Object Model. Structuring your system in a similar way makes obvious what data is available, how it relates to other data, and which lifetime restrictions hold. This way unnecessary errors related to ambiguously expressing data relationships in code, DDL or stored procedures can be avoided and valuable time for studying these ambiguous descriptions can be saved.

Extensibility to accommodate Business Logic
Overridable attributes, events and user-defined methods are ideal to add business logic to the object model. The tangible architect Class View Wizards makes adding business logic a snap.

Drag and Drop UI design using Databinding
Thanks to the data-binding support of generated business objects, you can drag and drop business objects to a form and get the textboxes, comboboxes or even sortable datagrids automaically data populated. Changes made in UI are reflected to database.

Reduced Error Rates with clear Naming, defined Semantics and Type-Safety
Strong named, type-safe collection methods reduce the error rate involved in object model use.

Schema Generation & Evolution and Deployment - No DDL Scripts needed!
The persistent object model automatically derives its database schema from the type-definitions and is able to create a database and insert the schema automatically. This way you can stop messing around with DDL scripts and associated versioning problems.

Reliable Transactions and Record Level Locking
Reliable transactions based on a classic connection-oriented architecture: this way, even under .NET, you can rely on record level locking and relax, even during multi-user operation.

Intelli-Sense support eases application development
Type-safe collection classes for access to relationships between objects enable the full benefits of Intelli-Sense.

Escaping the "Null"-value problem
Initialization of object attributes with default values - this way, you can avoid problems with "Null" -values.

Run-time framework built on top of Microsoft Meta Data Services

Object-oriented database browser
The object oriented database browser significantly simplifies debugging a database applications. You can easily navigate the whole database in an explorer-like GUI.

Intelligent object caching and garbage collection
The Advanced Caching Technology build into MDS assures high-performance data access. In conjunction with the automatic garbage collection features of .NET it provides a seamless experience working with persistent objects.

The Query API enables querying of data without use of SQL
Using the query API the compiler already notifies you when you access a database field that no longer exists or has been relocated. This protects you from SQL related crashes of your application at a customer site.

Royalty free redistribution

Modeling concepts based on UML Class Diagrams

tangible architect makes the following elements available for modeling:

Relationship types between persistent objects
- Composition corresponding to UML - a bi-directional "is part of " relationship with "create" and "delete cascade" semantics.
- Aggregation corresponding to UML - a bi-directional "is part of " relationship with "assign" and "unassign" semantics without "delete cascade" semantics.
- Association corresponding to UML - a bi-directional "is related to" relationship with "link" and "unlink" semantics without "delete cascade" semantics.
- Unique naming of objects and ordered relations are optional properties of the relations
* Sortable and Filterable Collections via CollectionView property
* Inheritance corresponding to UML
* Property types of persistent objects
- bool, char, string, byte, short, int, float, double, DateTime, decimal
- Binary large objects (BLOBs) are stored as byte arrays
* Default Values and Object Names
- Each attribute can be assigned a default value.
- A string attribute can be defined as an object name for each object. This is used for indexing, unique-naming relationships and to display object names in the object-oriented database browser.

Modeling is supported in UML or using C# Interfaces
tangible architect supports both code-based modeling via C# interfaces and UML-based modeling.

• Code-based modeling by means of .NET attributes in interface descriptions
• Support for UML forward, reverse and round-trip engineering
  This way model and code are always in sync.

Visual Studio.NET Integration
Integration of Visual Studio.NET is a part of our overall concept. The Wizards and special views make working in Visual Studio.NET easier:

• Class browser and wizards help working with and extending your object model
  The tangible architect class browser gives you a detailed overview of all persistent objects. Wizard for creating and editing persistent objects, attributes, relationships and methods can be found here.
• Visual Studio integrated Online Help
  The help is integrated with Visual Studio.NET and supports you at all times, providing you with valuable tips while authoring code.

Database support

• Microsoft SQL Server 2000, all languages and editions
• The free Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine, with Royalty Free Redistribution for MS SQL Server Developer Edition licensees
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005, all languages and editions
• The free Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, all languages and editions
• MS Access / Jet 4.0 (Limited)

Programming languages supported

• Microsoft C#

Editions
tangible architect is available in three editions suited for different project sizes. Project size is measured in terms of model elements. The number of model elements is the sum of the number of classes plus the number of relationships.