CodeSmith 3.0

ASPInsider Eric J. Smith has kept busy over the past several months working on a major upgrade to his CodeSmith toolset and released version 3.0 on May 16. While you'll be happy to learn that version 2.6 will continue to be available for free, both versions of 3.0 (Standard and Professional) are now paid products. I think this is a great move for both Eric and developers by helping ensure continued development of the tools, and the prices remain a bargain. I've been on two projects now where we saved literally weeks of development time by customizing CodeSmith's out-of-box scripts to generate our Data Access Layer's stored procedures and C# object code.

The revamped CodeSmith Studio is a wonderful environment. Where earlier versions were basically attractive text editors, this is a fully-featured, VS-like IDE for CodeSmith complete with debugging and Intellisense. It's a dream to use, I know I won't miss using TextPad for template development.

If you haven't looked into code generation for .NET yet, now is a great time. Go ahead and start with the free version to get an idea of what a time saver this can be, and check out the CodeSmtih Forums to see the cool stuff produced by this active, creative community.