Announcing NuGet release of GenericServices

I am pleased to say that I have finally released a version of the GenericServices on NuGet!

For those who are not aware of GenericServices it is an open-source .NET library designed to help developer build a service layer, i.e. a layer that acts as a facard/adapter between your database in the data layer and your User Interface or HTTP service.

GenericServices makes heavy use of Entity Framework 6 – EF6 and .NET 4.5’s async/await commands. Its aim is to make the creation of the service layer simple while providing robust implementations of standard database access commands. You can get a summary of its features in from the Why GenericServices? page on the GenericServices documentation site or the README page on the GenericServices’ GitHub home page.

Link to NuGet Version

The library is known as GenericServices on NuGet, so simply search with that name in the ‘Manage NuGet Packages’ in Visual Studio. You can also find it on NuGet at https://www.nuget.org/packages/GenericServices/ .

Why have you released on NuGet now?

I did not feel confident to release GenericServices onto NuGet, where it is likely to get much more use, until I had good documentation and examples. In the past two weeks I have:

1. I have written quite a bit of documentation and added a useful index in the sidebar. Do have a look at the documentation in the GenericServices’ Wiki.
2. I have made available a much more advanced example called SampleMvcWebAppComplex. SampleMvcWebAppComplex is a ASP.NET MVC5 web site which was built as a ‘stress test’ of how well GenericServices library and Microsoft’s Entity Framework V6 could cope with an existing SQL database AdventureWorksLT2012.
   1. The example web site is at http://complex.samplemvcwebapp.net/.
   2. The source code is available as a reference source. Note: this project is not fully open-source because it uses a paid-for library, Kendo UI MVC.
3. There are two articles I wrote on the Simple-Talk web site that describe in detail the process I went through to build SampleMvcWebAppComplex. They are:

• Part 1: Using Entity Framework with an Existing Database: Data Access. All about handling existing SQL databases using Entity Framework.
• Part 2: Using Entity Framework with an Existing Database: User Interface. Descibes the overall architecture of the system.

I still have the original, more basic example web site called SampleMvcWebApp. You can access this via:

1. The live example web site is at http://samplemvcwebapp.net/
2. The source code, which is fully open-source, is available too.

Happy coding!