Intended Audiences: Freelance Developers / Small IT Companies IT Managers of Small-Medium Sized Businesses - CIO / CTO

Hi, I’m Mike and I’m an Angular + .NET freelance developer with 25 years in the web-app development business. Over the years, I’ve built myself some crude console applications that automate a lot of the boring and time consuming parts of my job: getting new apps started and developing CRUD admin features. These tools have allowed me to remain competitive with larger web development firms because I can provide my clients with more affordable web applications faster and cheaper than they thought possible. I thought that if these tools are saving me so much time, then they’ve got to be of use to others as well. That’s why I decided to refine my tools for the public by building LymeStack. LymeStack consists of two main components.

Full-Stack Web Application Template with Admin Area:

LymeStack comes with a standard web application template that allows a developer to scaffold a new app in just minutes for a new client or project. This web app starter template comes with a stable, feature-rich admin area prebuilt, allowing your client’s administrators to have a large degree of control and transparency in their web application out-of-box. This ability for your clients to self-service common tasks reduces interruptions in your work day by substantially decreasing support emails and phone calls.

The template and admin area are filled with lots of goodies that would normally need to be built from scratch: user management / role assignment, SSO authentication, audit-logging, error logging, app health checks… [the list goes on](https://www.lymestack.com/blog/getting-started-is-the-hardes...). All of these features combined would take a single experienced developer *at least a month* to build. LymeStack offers exponentially more than any other half-stack (front-end only) template or starter tutorial that I’ve come across so far and serves as a solid starting point, enabling developers to get to work right away on their client’s core concerns.

Automated CRUD / Reporting Feature Generation

This template is accompanied by a “Scaffold Feature” tool that automates much of the time-consuming, error-prone, tedious work involved when creating CRUD admin features and reports. The tool will generate standard Angular and C# code from existing database tables or stored procedure output, making it useful for both new feature development and system modernization projects. In fact, many of the LymeStack tools originated specifically to help modernize an old Crystal Reports / ASP Classic system and have since gone on to help modernize other legacy .NET Framework applications.

On average, 1000 lines of code (and around 30 different Angular + C# files) are generated per each scaffold operation. This number can increase significantly depending on the number of fields that exist in the table that you’re working with. Imagine how long it would take to write that amount of code from scratch. The increase in productivity is significant!

These tools generate standard open source code (*not* proprietary to LymeStack) that any Angular or .NET developer should feel comfortable customizing using standard free tools such as Visual Studio Code. LymeStack focuses on readability and code consistency to make more maintainable applications that can be supported by more than just one developer. Additionally, licenses on any code generated from commercial or community licenses are perpetual, allowing you to continue using the web application as you please without being beholden to a subscription.