If you have not heard about Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology, let me brief you the concept. In general, RAD means to develop your application in the fastest way possible, to accomplish that, your business rules will be "drawn" instead of code! Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 has to provide a very powerful tool call dataset designer, which allows the developer to create their software in the time of just 30% of what normally needed or required.

For Visual Studio programmer, they are used to using the screen designer (Form designer) to draw the user interface, but now Visual Studio dot net bring this into new era, they can start drawing the data access and update layer, without the needs to do a single code! Certainly, if they need to insert some validation and customized coding, they can do so with the help of new VS2005 or VS2008!

Dataset designer allows developer to create object representation of the database table, and set the access, update and delete SQL command into the dataset object, there are no need for developer to use external tools such as codesmith to generate the insert, update and delete stored procedure into the database! All changes will be reflected into the dataset automatically!

For VS2008, Microsoft has brought the RAD capability of Visual Studio into full support for 3-tier design, using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to create communication proxy for the client and server, developer can easily migrate existing dot net 2.0 design into 3-tier design with minimum coding!

Cynics Accounting 3-tier framework is fully compatible with VS2005 and VS2008, developer can start learning or using such a framework to adapt themselves with the newly introduced dataset designer, saving hundreds or even thousands of coding hours for their accounting or business software project.

To fully leverage existing dot net framework, developer should comply to Microsoft coding method and recommended tools. Although using 3rd party tools always has its' advantages of portability, but from my own survey over Visual Studio for the pass 2 years, they seem to be satisfied with dot net 2.0 and all base elements has been preserved for VS2008 as well. In other words, VS2008 only added tools and power to VS2005, all codes in VS2005 can be easily port to VS2008, and the tools provided in VS2008 will be added on for future development!

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Download Cynics Software Rapid Application Development Source Code Framework For Dot Net Accounting and Business Software.