Eric J. Smith's Weblog

“I really wish I had looked at Codesmith a year ago when it was first recommended to me. If you want to see some of the possibilities, download it, and then download the .NetTiers templates. If you run these you will be amazed not only at the code produced, but the comments, and even the NUnit tests!”

“Consistency is its own reward: This fact cannot be overstressed at the project level and has real benefits at the shop level.  Here are a few of the big ones.  Pick a naming convention and stick with it.  This works for code and stored procedures.  It makes it easier for you and others to read your code.”

“It took about 4 minutes to create the template, and using it is enjoyable. The alternative would have been unenjoyable. Thus, using CodeSmith is enjoyable.“

Scott has updated his ultimate tools and powers users list for 2005:

CodeSmith 3.0 is now available for download!!  For more information about what's new with CodeSmith 3.0, please check out my CodeSmith 3.0 RC1 announcement.

CodeSmith Tools, LLC is pleased to announce the immediate availability of CodeSmith 3.0 Release Candidate 1. CodeSmith 3.0 is the latest version of the most powerful code generation tool on the market. With features such as template based code generation, a rich integrated template development environment, highly extensible metadata system that includes database schema and XML sources standard, and now statement completion all make building custom templates that much easier.

I have been working with ASP.NET 2.0 for the past few weeks and it has been an incredible experience.  There are just SO many great new things that it would be impossible to list them all.  My personal favorites are master pages, ObjectDataSource, two-way databinding, and being able to register user controls globally in web.config.