I’d heard of IronSpeed Designer (ISD)  a few years ago, and even downloaded the trial version, but it wasn’t until recently when working with a client that I decided to give it a real shot. They were on a tight budget and wanted a basic interface to enter data into a new database I built for them.

I wanted a quick and dirty database UI generator - I could write the UI myself, but it would take longer and cost them more, so I was looking for a more automated solution.

Before I decided to give ISD a shot, I had a look at Microsoft’s Dynamic Data project they have for Visual Studio. It looks promising, but it’s still not ready for prime-time - particularly, they didn’t have much support for many-to-many table relationships.

ISD out of the box actually created a pretty decent data app - it has many wizards for creating the initial app, the various pages, the various tables and sub-panels on each page, and even for custom code generation. You can create an entire application without writing a single line of code.

On the other hand, it generates ASP.Net code (VB or C#) that you can load up in Visual Studio (it even has a Visual Studio button on it’s menu) and customize the code to your heart’s content - just stay away from the autogenerated sections and ISD won’t overwrite your code when it regenerates the pages.

The documentation is pretty decent, although it’s still sometimes challenging to find how to do something you’re scratching your head over. The training videos are helpful, but there aren’t enough of them (IMHO) and when you want to get something done thats slightly tricky, you have to dig into the Knowledge Base or the user Forum.

ISD is a powerful program, and a valuable tool in my reperatoire. It’s not perfect and has a few quirks yet, but I’m being productive with it.