Teach Yourself Visual Studio® .NET 2003 in 21 Days [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

ORM is cool, but it seems like overkill. I'm a consultant, and this is a lot of work to go through each time I start a new project. Is it really necessary?

That's a good point. Using ORM models to define a conceptual data model before you create a physical model is completely up to you. The nice thing about doing a conceptual model first is that it can help you really understand what needs to happen with the project. By interviewing the users of the system you're building and taking the information they give you and plugging it into a data model, you're actually building the physical database at the same time. Also, after the model is in the database, you can update Visio and then update the database using Visio, so you're actually creating a nice audit of everything you're doing. It isn't a bad practice to get into, but I think you must be disciplined if you decide to do it.

I'm trying to reverse-engineer a database in Visio as you suggested. But I keep running into problems after I create the data source and try to run the reverse-engineering process. Why?

When reverse-engineering a database, make sure that you set up the correct Visio database drivers by selecting the Drivers menu item from the Tools, Options menu. This must be set up in conjunction with the OBDC data source you're reverse-engineering.