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by Duncan Mackenzie.
Original Post: I've never used it to its full potential... and I still wouldn't do without it...
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Feed Description: Duncan is the Visual Basic Content Strategist at MSDN, the editor of the Visual Basic Developer Center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic), and the author of the "Coding 4 Fun" column on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/using/columns/code4fun/default.aspx). While typically Visual Basic focused, his blogs sometimes wanders off of the technical path and into various musing of his troubled mind.
CodeSmith 2.5 is available, and although I've mentioned it in a few articles on MSDN already, I have to tell you again... I use this utility all the time.
It is fairly obvious, if you look at the code from any one of my articles, that I use Code Smith to generate my strongly typed collections in almost every single project. What isn't obvious is how often I use it in my own projects that never get published (internal to Microsoft, or for myself)... it is invaluable and I've never even created my own templates. From what I understand, I'm missing out on so much potential time-saving it is almost silly that I haven't looked at creating my own templates yet, but being able to quickly create my Jobs collection for my custom Job class (very useful if you are planning to then bind the Jobs collection to a DataGrid) has been reason enough to install Code Smith on every development machine I set up. Anyway, the crazy thing is that Eric (creator of Code Smith) just came out with Code Smith Professional (or Studio, or something... :) ), which appears to do even more (for $$, sorry folks)... and I hadn't even run out of things to build with the free version (which hasn't gone away... no worries) ... yikes. Well, I should really spend some time looking at it... I hate the thought that I could be saving a ton of time and I'm not!
What about you folks, how much do you use Code Generation tools in general? Do you use CodeSmith? What about Kathleen Dollard's book (Code Generation in .NET by APress)? Read it, loved it, hated it?
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