OK, so tell me we haven’t all done this at least once. We come across a way to improve our output efficiency, and at the same time to enforce good design and standards – we figure we should provide the rest of the team with a tool that can help them achieve the same. We feel, for a small and fleeting moment, that warm glow.
Until someone comes along and points out a far better implementation of your optimisation, and delivers up a tool that’s more extensible, better integrated and (more importantly) finished. Don’t you just hate that?
Well you shouldn’t, and I don’t anymore. Bill Jones makes a good case for why you should be looking at CodeSmith 3.0 (Erics site was temporarily down when this was posted).
I found myself frequently writing the same CRUD code for my data layer objects. After looking at some great DAL generators (nTierGen.Net from Gavin Joyce is in my opinion one of the best), I threw together a DAL generator based around a code templating system. CodeSmith takes that idea and implements it beautifully. Really, take a look!