I’ve been beavering away at a little website and decided – after a bit of investigation and then seeing Scott Guthrie talk at Azurecraft, London – to use DocumentDb for the data storage. At that point I didn’t have a massive amount of experience with NoSQL databases, but when I want to learn something I like to dive straight in, start coding, making mistakes, and hopefully come out the other side with some workable knowledge.

The website is node.js based, and I found the initial setup of DocumentDb pretty straight forward after running the the tutorials. I was up and running quickly, but I soon realised I wanted a tool for developing and testing queries, and playing around with my dev database. The Azure portal isn’t massively geared up for this. I saw one application, but even in this web/cloudy world I knew that with my arsenal of Material Design In XAML Toolkit and Dragablz libraries, I could throw together a desktop app to grease the gears of developing the web app.

Yesterday I published the first full alpha release of that effort. “doobry” is simple to use, yet slick and pretty feature rich. With it you can:

Edit and run SQL queries

Create, edit, copy and delete collection documents

Work with multiple databases

It’s open source, free to use, and an installer is available:

It’s also a great showcase of all the things you can do with Material Design In XAML and Dragablz, utilizing features such as:

Docking and layout persistance

Advanced dialogs

Transitions

Hopefully if you are using DocumentDb this tool will help you get along in your development and support tasks. And if you are developing WPF Material Design/Dragablz applications you might find some UX inspiration and helpful XAML techniques within the source.