Code Smith opinions
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Mark, My company purchased Code Smith version 4 and 5. CS 4 was mostly stable, but CS 5 flat out broke on the upgrade and would do nothing but throw ADO .NET exceptions, making it completely unusable. There were several patches released, and having uninstalled and reinstall several times with no success, I stopped using the product. "Out of the box" the product itself does little for you, as others have stated, you have to vest heavily in your templates. When I did use it, it was handy for generation of NHibernate mappings, DTOs and base CSLA objects, but our business layer has been done for some time now, and so I have little to no use for that product and do not miss it. BTW - there are free opensource code generation tools available, today, that can generate everything I just mentioned. Visit SourceForge.net to find them.
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLHey, I use CS, v5 and have had none of the problems any of the other posters stated... but will always look to get a free product to do what a pay-for-it product does... Do you have a suggestion for any of the CS free open source sourceforge.net tools?
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I looked at CodeSmith once and thought it was able to produce a lot of code quickly, but the code was mediocre quality at best. An off-shore team is proposing to use it for a project. My opinion is they are using it to mask skills and pretend to deliver high quality work. Anyone else have an opinion? Have you used it?
I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt
I often see terrible quality applications that are developed using Wizards and Code Generation Tools. It might not be true for everyone but IMHO, most people who use them either don't enjoy coding or have low coding skills, except when it's a project requirement. Wizards and Tools usually takes the control out of the developer and might produce undesirable results, poor performance and/or code hard to maintain. That's why I never use this stuff and code everything by hand. In the end it saves me time from having to do workarounds on code produced by these tools. Of course sometimes I need to use the stuff and I always argue against management on using these tools. If I were you, I would try to talk this out of them. Regards, Fábio
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I often see terrible quality applications that are developed using Wizards and Code Generation Tools. It might not be true for everyone but IMHO, most people who use them either don't enjoy coding or have low coding skills, except when it's a project requirement. Wizards and Tools usually takes the control out of the developer and might produce undesirable results, poor performance and/or code hard to maintain. That's why I never use this stuff and code everything by hand. In the end it saves me time from having to do workarounds on code produced by these tools. Of course sometimes I need to use the stuff and I always argue against management on using these tools. If I were you, I would try to talk this out of them. Regards, Fábio
Unfortunately the decision was made, no real choice was given. The sad part is three weeks of effort including fully constructed DAL and partial BL was thrown out because the offshore team wanted to start over with code smith.
I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt
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Unfortunately the decision was made, no real choice was given. The sad part is three weeks of effort including fully constructed DAL and partial BL was thrown out because the offshore team wanted to start over with code smith.
I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt
That's sad. This kind of stuff frustrates me when it happens. But then, now that you have to do it this way, expose them the problems you "WILL" be getting along the way so next time this can be avoided.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
It's useful for churning out a data layer, and some lower levels of business laye
There is the rub. They have been provided with fully functional DAL and basic BL.
I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt
Oh dear. Then CodeSmith is virtually useless to them.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
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I looked at CodeSmith once and thought it was able to produce a lot of code quickly, but the code was mediocre quality at best. An off-shore team is proposing to use it for a project. My opinion is they are using it to mask skills and pretend to deliver high quality work. Anyone else have an opinion? Have you used it?
I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt
Why bother buying software at all? VS supports text-based templating out of the box via the T4 engine. This is the technology behind how VS generates many of its own designer-specified files. Basically you drop a .tt file into your project and it'll spit out a C# or VB source file that is part of your project. T4 templates are available online and can be really complex. For example I've seen T4 templates to auto-generate metadata classes to use in lieu of string names for INotifyPropertyChange interfaces. I've also seen templates for generating the boiler-plate code for dependency properties in WPF. There are entire websites dedicated to T4 if you're interested. It is by no means the best solution in all cases nor is it necessarily easy to create complex templates but its capabilities are phenomenal especially when you consider that it can execute custom code that works against the IDEs project object model. It really allows you to do things that would otherwise be difficult. Best of all it is free and already integrated into VS.
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Why bother buying software at all? VS supports text-based templating out of the box via the T4 engine. This is the technology behind how VS generates many of its own designer-specified files. Basically you drop a .tt file into your project and it'll spit out a C# or VB source file that is part of your project. T4 templates are available online and can be really complex. For example I've seen T4 templates to auto-generate metadata classes to use in lieu of string names for INotifyPropertyChange interfaces. I've also seen templates for generating the boiler-plate code for dependency properties in WPF. There are entire websites dedicated to T4 if you're interested. It is by no means the best solution in all cases nor is it necessarily easy to create complex templates but its capabilities are phenomenal especially when you consider that it can execute custom code that works against the IDEs project object model. It really allows you to do things that would otherwise be difficult. Best of all it is free and already integrated into VS.
Here is a link for anyone interested http://www.hanselman.com/blog/T4TextTemplateTransformationToolkitCodeGenerationBestKeptVisualStudioSecret.aspx[^]
I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt