ECO lets you move from building your model to executing and interacting with that model incredibly quickly. The model-aware framework with its databinding support, autoforms capabilities, etc mean you can build UI’s that let you play with your model faster than any other tool.

However, ungrateful bugger that I am, I’m now spoiled and "incredibly quickly" just isn’t fast enough anymore. What I want is a way to create my model, and without setting up anything, I want to be able to interact with it. Or more often, change my model, and test out my changes immediately, without adding the necesary UI bits until I know that it works how I want it to work.

Well, lurking away in a dark corner of the ECO Framework is something that gets me very close to that. The ECOSpace Debugger gives you a UI that lets you, amongst other things:

• create, edit and delete instances of objects in your model
• bring up autoforms for an object
• set Checkpoints, then undu and redo changes
• start, commit and rollback object transactions

At the moment you still need to write the code to invoke the ECOSpace Debugger, but it’s only a couple of lines, so that’s still pretty amazing.

Here’s the steps to try it out:

• Create a new Winforms ECO app
• Define a few classes and associations in your model
• Add the Borland.ECO.Diagnostics namespace to your mainform’s uses clause.
• Drop a button on your mainform, and in the Click event add the following code:

EcoSpaceDebugger.Create(EcoSpace).Show;

That’s it! Run your app, click the button, and you can start playing with your model. Change your model, run the app again and interact with your changes. How simple is that?

If you want to have a bit more of a sniff around, double-click on the Borland.Eco.Windows.Forms.dll in the References section of the Project manager, and drill down into the Borland.Eco.Diagnostics namespace using the Reflection tool built into the IDE.

I did say I was ungrateful. Now that I have this, I want to get rid of that button and line of source. Like maybe by creating a non-visual component that shows the debugger on create, if a boolean property is set to true. Hmmm, maybe on my next flight…