Eric J. Smith's Weblog

In case you missed it, Nikhil has posted a screenshot of the new Web Matrix.  Looks pretty cool, but I'm wondering about the theming comment.  Now, is web matrix simply taking advantage of the built in windows theme, or are they doing something magical to give their app a new theme. 

Download Now

RedRiver and I have agreed to terms and now I just need to go get my signature notarized on the contract.  I believe that we could see a new CodeSmith release by this weekend.

I have been reading the blog entries (here, here) lately about Typed DataSets and it makes me wonder if anyone has really sat down and compared the performance of a custom object/collection (using a data reader to populate) to a Typed DataSet?  Performance was critical to us so we decided to go the custom collection route and we were very happy with the results, but we never actually sat down and figured out what the performance difference was.  We assumed that considering all the bells and whistles that are associated with DataSets that custom collections would be a major performance win.  And since we were using CodeSmith to generate those custom collections, it wasn't any more work to use them.  Does anyone know of any benchmarks that I could look at?

http://www.sellsbrothers.com/As of today, the functionality of CollectionGen has been sucked into Eric Smith's CodeSmith. I asked Eric to take on these features because CodeSmith does all of what CollectionGen does and more. All new feature requests/bug reports should go his way. Of course, feel free to continue to use CollectionGen as a model for VS.NET Custom Tools.

Posted by Chris Sells on Mon, May 5, 2003 @ 10:31AM

Here is a list of the changes for the next version of CodeSmith. It is ready to release now, but I am not legally able to release a new version until ownership has been transferred to me from RedRiver Systems. So far I have $100 of ~$300 (this is the revised estimate after speaking in detail with several lawyers) needed for lawyer fees to make the transfer happen.

• Removed expiration.
• Added CodeSmithConsole.exe to enable processing a .xml property file from the command line. (CSharpCodeGeneratorSample and VBCodeGeneratorSample folders)
• Created installer.
• Added a Visual Basic Code Generator Sample (VBCodeGeneratorSample).
• Added a designer for the DatabaseSchema object.
• Added Owner property to TableSchema, ViewSchema, and CommandSchema and fixed bug relating to tables, stored procedures and views were assuming dbo as an owner.
• Fixed problem where SchemaExplorer would fail if collation was different from the master database.
• Added view support to SchemaExplorer.
• Fixed problem with SQL7 compatibility and column descriptions.
• Updated CollectionGen templates from the latest CollectionGen release.
• Changed to a build system instead of going on and on forever with beta builds.
• Dropped support for Visual Studio .NET 2002. The Visual Studio features will only work with the final release of Visual Studio .NET 2003.
• Dropped RedRiver from all namespaces. If you have templates that refer to RedRiver, you will need to update them.

If you would like to see these new features/changes released, please help support CodeSmith by clicking on the image below and making a donation. All donations are appreciated!

Great, but my point  is still valid,  this break the rules.

Because I think about production environment. Because I talk about sites went live since few months, and suddenly a new rule come without any publicity, and change the rules, creating errors.

This is what I call a very bad mistake to implement a new rule which break your code.

I would prefer to have this feature having a false value by default, and some strong recomendations by .Net team to turn it on rather than now having to check every single page.

Many people have pointed out the existance of the Code Generation Network.  This looks like a very nice site and has a big list of code generation tools.  While browsing through it, I found a link to this interview of Dave Thomas.  I agree with a lot of what he has to say.  Until recently, CodeSmith has been a "smelly" code generation tool since it didn't have a lot of support for active generation, but with the recent addition of the VS.NET code generator it can now be used as an active generator.  I also have plans to add command line support and, thanks to a great suggestion by Duncan Godwin, I have also added a Nant build task to my TODO list.  As soon as I can get CodeSmith legally transfered to me, I will be able to start working on these ideas.  I truely believe that CodeSmith has the best template based code generation engine out of everything I have looked at and if I get to work adding more active generation support it will truely be a very powerful tool.