Eric J. Smith's Weblog

It's time for a new contest, and I'm one of the judges.

Mike Gunderloy has just posted a new article about XML-based Code Generation with CodeSmith over at Developer.com.  Mike does a great job of explaining the new XmlProperty feature in CodeSmith and how powerful it can be in using XML as metadata for your templates.

The presentation at the North Dallas .NET User's Group last night went awesome!  The room was packed (over 265 people) and Rob Howard did an amazing job presenting CodeSmith 3.0 and getting people excited about it like I could never do.    Rob is such a great speaker and it was very surreal seeing him doing a presentation on an application that I wrote.  We recorded the presentation and we will hopefully have it available for everyone to see online in the near future.  In the meantime, here is a link to the slides from the presentation.

If you live (or can travel to) the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex, please join the North Dallas .NET User Group on August 3, for a CodeSmith 3.0 Tips & Tricks demo-filled session by my partner Rob Howard.  As an added bonus all attendees will get a *FREE* license to CodeSmith 3.0 Professional -- a $399 value!!

Development Tool of the Year

“How many times you you been coding a business or data layer object and thought... "This is sooo repetitve there must be a better way."  Well there is!  CodeSmith is a template driven code generation tool.  Now don't lose me... I know you heard code generation and are thinking this is some blue sky type of tool, but trust me this is the real deal.” …

Scott Hanselman points out that his TechEd 2005 code generation talk is available online now.  Scott is a great presenter and does a great job on this talk.  Scott’s company Corillian makes extensive use of code generation techniques and CodeSmith is their code generation tool of choice.

Batch code generation with CodeSmith console

… “I'm always keeping my eyes open for practical tools that save time and mental sanity. One of the most mentally-draining tasks is repetitious modifying of simple code. For example, many simple CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete) stored procedures, and their accompanying DAL and Business Objects are redundant. Ideally we could just auto-generate this given the inputs. Auto code generation is a great time saver, which frees us from boring tasks to focus on interesting ones.” …

I haven’t had a chance to read this book yet, but it looks like it will be full of great information.  Chapter 9 talks about using code generation techniques (CodeSmith in particular) to aid in the delivery process.