Dear Microsoft, please take good care of SubSonic
Now that Microsoft has hired Rob Conery from the SubSonic project I’m hoping and praying that Microsoft will put as least as much energy behind SubSonic as they put behind their own .NET projects.
Today, I needed to add another filter to an existing query that was created with a popular ASP.NET ORM that will remain nameless (it’s not SubSonic). I started by trying to decipher the 30 or so lines of code that created the query, but after around an hour of screwing around with it, I had made no progress. Finally, I gave up and asked a fellow employee who is more experienced with this particular ORM if he could figure out exactly what I needed to do to modify the query. Another 15 minutes of staring at the screen and we had finally determined what the intent behind the query was, and where I needed to add another line to filter on the field I wanted to filter on. Now, I concede that maybe I’m an idiot, and that’s why I couldn’t figure how to change the query. But my fellow employee is not an idiot and it still took him much longer than I think it should have to make a change to a fairly simple query.
This isn’t the first time I’ve run into problems with this ORM (it’s not even the first time this weekâand it’s only Tuesday). Had we (the fellow ORM enthusiasts and I) have known how troublesome it would be, maybe we wouldn’t have chosen it. But when we were first looking for a decent ASP.NET ORM (around 2 years ago) there really weren’t a lot of viable options out there that offered stability and flexibility, and didn’t require hundreds of lines of XML configuration. So we chose it. And we convinced the skeptics that it was great by showing off how much time it shaved off simple CRUD tasks. And, in the end, everyone learned to use it. Even if it meant coding around some of it’s shortcomings.
But now there are options. Really, really good options, like SubSonic. I’ve been following the SubSonic project for while, and I’d love to use it for a new project. The problem is that it’s another new ORM to learn. And while I’m willing to learn it, I can’t guarantee that everyone working with me on a project is going to be willing to or have the time to learn it. It was a big enough hurdle to convince people that our current ORM (as complicated as it is) was the right option. Now that I’ve changed my mind about it, how can I convince people that SubSonic is going to be any better?
I’m hoping that Microsoft will do the convincing for me. Now that Rob Conery is at Microsoft, I’ve sort of taken for granted that SubSonic will be the default model layer for Microsoft’s new ASP.NET MVC framework. But Microsoft already has other technologies (like LINQ) that could be used in the place of SubSonic for database connections. Personally, I don’t think Microsoft offers anything that has as much potential as SubSonic. My hope is that, even though it wasn’t invented at Microsoft, and it’s a open source project, Microsoft will still put some muscle behind SubSonic. Not just development muscle, but maybe a little marketing muscle too. At least the same kind of marketing they use for the rest of ASP.NET. If only so that someday I’ll never use our current ORM ever again.