I spoke with Jens Mikkelsen and Jimmi Lhyne Anderson from LearnSitecore the other week about who I am, Dreamcore and Team Development for Sitecore.
What is Team Development for Sitecore and how can it help you?
Download: Learn Sitecore
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This was my first podcast experience so cut me some slack ;) Thanks to Jens and Jimmi for having me.
James, What you wrote sounds correct. We have objects that mirror a Sitecore template. There are more than a few people out there doing this sort of thing. Perhaps the best known is "DomainObjects," which is distributed as a "Shared Source Module" @ http://trac.sitecore.net/DomainObjects
I do not use this specific module as we came up with something similar, but that is something worth considering.
Our goal with TDS will be to generated the code automatically for you and cut down development time even further! There are also code generation modules out there, but the one thing lacking is the integration into Visual Studio.
As for working backwards (code -> Sitecore) that is an interesting idea. I am not sure where that fits in with TDS, but it could be a fun exercise. This was just posted the other day, which sounds similar http://www.karlkopp.com/blog/2010/9/16/html-to-sitecore-in-one-click
Hi Sean, nice podcast. I'm new to Sitecore (currently working on moving our existing websites to Sitecore) and have we have just got TDS installed and working, so it was interesting to hear something about TDS and where it is going.
I have a question about the object modelling you talk about at the end of the podcast and how you handle Sitecore items in code. At the moment when I need to change an item, or a field on an item, programmatically I get the item and edit the fields I need directly. It sounds like you create classes which are wrappers or interfaces for your templates (and thus items) and use these to classes to manipulate the item. Is this correct? It seems like a fair bit of extra work but I can see some advantages too.
Would you consider doing this modelling/code generation in the other direction? That is, from classes (that might have been made by an ORM) to Sitecore templates? I think this would be more complex and possibly not as useful, but interesting none the less.
Cheers,
James.