Eric J. Smith's Weblog

One of the cool things about Microsoft is that there's a boatload of smart people in it.  More to the point, many of those smart people are building wicked cool pieces of software that are available to you for free (and in many cases, with source code included!).  So, here's your link to one of Microsoft's better-kept secrets (we're working on changing that):  OLYMARS (the interesting name comes from a shortened version of the creator's favorite soccer/football team, Olympique de Marseilles).  What is so special about this utility?  Well, to put it simply, it's a SQL Server .NET code generator.  And not just some cheezy tossed-together thing, this one has several superb charactaristics:

I just saw this post in the ASP.NET forums.  It says that if you were to re-build the IBuySpy Portal application in ASP.NET 2.0 that there would be 70% less code!!  I can't imagine what has been done to allow this, but I am excited!

Well, I just bought my first DVD burner (Sony DRU-500A) so that I can send home videos to my family in Rochester, NY.  I have been working with Windows Movie Maker 2 to edit my videos and I must say that I love this program!  My only complaint is that I wish it had direct support for burning DVD's when I am done editing them.

My second child was born yesterday.  Her name is Carson Lou Ann Smith.

Well, it looks like my parsing engine is going to need to be re-written.  A user posted a bug report saying that large templates hang CodeSmith.  I checked it out today and he is right.  I knew that I would need to re-write the engine at some point because I need to keep track of line numbers and I want to change the Response object to be an indented text writer.  The bad news is that we are starting to get really busy at work and it will stay that way for a while so it might be a while before I get this change done.  The good news is that these changes in addition to fixing this bug will allow debugging of the template code itself by providing #line directives in the generated source and the indented text writer will make it possible to keep clean code when we start getting into things like sub-templates and data-bound template controls.