Persistent Classes

Step 1: Write Classes

You are programming normal .NET classes that describe your application domain. You simply map relationships to other persistent classes with fields of the type of the other class or with List<T>.

Step 2: Mark your classes as persistent

You mark your classes with the [NDOPersistent] attribute. Relations are marked with the [NDORelation] attribute. These are the only two attributes you need for NDO. The NDO Add-in helps you: You can create persistent classes and relationships at the touch of a button on the NDO toolbar in Visual Studio. 

Step 3: Create Your Database

You enable the NDO add-in in Visual Studio in the NDO configuration dialog. Here you can also create databases or enter data connections. NDO then creates, among other things, a Sql script that you can use to create or modify the tables in the database. The structure of these databases is easy to read and can be easily evaluated by external tools such as report generators.