Automating the creation of Seed Data

Wednesday, August 02, 2006 11:00:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Just about every project I have had a need a need to create some seed data.  It’s a pain to come up with good seed data, especially around names of people.
 
The is the main purpose behind the SeedData.cs class that I wrote to create random names of people.  A quick search brought me to data gathered in the 1990 census.  There were over 80,000 last names and 5000 first names.  Pretty good mix for generating seed data.
 
I also added the capability to read in a file delimited by crlf to support creating other seed data based on lists in text files.
 
If you add any other seed data files, send the updates to me and I will post them.
 

SeedData.zip