* Orcas : BLINQ Preview

Blinq is a ASP.NET pages/website generation tool used for displaying and modifying data in a database.

If you point Blinq to a SQL database it will generate the complete website based on database schema to do the following :

1. Select, Insert, Update and Delete functionality.

2. Details of a record navigation.

3. Sorting and Pagination of records.

As it uses LINQ framework to access data :

Web Linq became BLinq.

It is definitely used as a starting point to any website as most of the websites contains mainly db operations. The generated code be modified to project specific requirements.

BLINQ June 2006 CTP can be downloaded from here

BLINQ CTP requires LINQ May 2006 CTP to be installed as pre-requisite which can be downloaded from here

Blinq is a command line tool with many optional arguments. A typical command will look like following :

Blinq /t:c:\BlinqSite /database:BlinqDatabase /server:name /user:name /password:name /vDir:BlinqSite

where, /t is the path where files need to be generated, /database,server,user,password are db related details, vDir is the name of virtual directory.

Lets see Blinq in action.

Create a db and a single table with following spec :

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Table_1](
[EmpNo] [int] NOT NULL,
[EmpName] [char](60) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NOT NULL,
[EmpAge] [int] NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_Table_1] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
[EmpNo] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF) ON [PRIMARY]
) ON [PRIMARY]

-> Primary Key is mandatory on each table.

Run the tool. After generation is over a default page of the generated website will be opened in browser. Following are the screen shots of some of the screens generated.

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