I recently had some rare free time available and decided to spend it checking out the latest edition of Iron Speed Designer - the Cadillac of .NET Web Application Generator tools. I have used ISD in the past and reviewed it a few years ago going as far as hosting a simple help desk application to demonstrate some features that are available in Iron Speed Designer. I was glad to see that the latest version has made significant improvements in many areas and was able to quickly generate a sample web application. For my testing purposes I created a small and simple database such as might be used for a real estate listings web site. In addition to fields for the listing price, date listed, number of bedrooms, etc, I created some fields to hold images of each listing. I then started up Iron Speed Designer and in just a few minutes had a very attractive and functional web application. I was pleased at how ISD automatically created a button (and the code behind the button) to allow for uploading the photos and then displayed thumnail images in table view and original size photos in the form view. This alone is pretty impressive, as are most things about Iron Speed Designer. However, to get to the next step in creating this little application you would want to really create pages for visitors to be able to anonymously browse the web site, with other sites for use by the agents to login and add/edit listings, upload photos, etc. ISD provides this ability to add security - but not in the Free edition. Well, that's OK, it was just a quick little application but what about deploying the sample web application? Hey that's great Iron Speed Designer has a menu option called Deploy! Great, except this ability is also not available in the free edition. In fact if you go to http://www.ironspeed.com you too can download a functional - but limited free edition. This may be enough to get you to evaluate the latest version of Iron Speed Designer and see what is possible in a short period of time - despite the limitations in the free edition - they make it easy to purchase the Professional or Enterprise Edition.
Have Fun!