I only rarely get excited about Open Source Software (OSS) out there.  Most of it is poorly documented, other stuff doesn't work, and the worst: it's documented, and the documentation and walkthroughs are wrong (ie Don't work).  When viewing new OSS I mainly ask...is it worth it to even try the crap out?

SubSonic - The Zero Code DAL came out of no where, at least for me.  I was looking into trying something new like Castle's Active Record, got side tracked, read the wikipedia about the Active Record pattern and its uses in Ruby on Rails (which I've tried out before) and PHP implementations and such.  At the bottom there's a link to Castle's ActiveRecord, which I have tried unsuccessfully before to even get the most basic things working on.

Directly below that link is the SubSonic link, with the tagline "Zero Code".  I'm about as lazy as it gets when writing horribly boring DAL code so that definately peaked my interest.  Sure enough this open source effort has some documentation.  The video seems a tad old, but Scott Kuhl wrote up what seems to be a more current walkthrough with code examples and how to get setup.

Good enough for me!  After watching and checking out the syntax that's similar to other OR/M or code generation tools out there coupled with the fact that it's FREE, I'm excited.  Woot.

Now I just pray that everything works as advertised.  I'll report back.