This past week CodeSmith Tools released CodeSmith 4.0 at Dev Connections in Las Vegas on November 8, 2006. CodeSmith is a code generation engine that is highly regarded within the .NET developer community.
"It's all about making common, time consuming, repetitive tasks easier," says Rob Howard, a Partner at CodeSmith. "CodeSmith has been such a huge success due in large part to the extensible template driven architecture that gives software professionals full control over the code that CodeSmith generates --- there is no ‘black box', and software developers appreciate that."
New Features in 4.0:
- CodeSmith Projects (.csp) - This feature makes automating your code generation process really easy and consistent whether you are working from inside of Visual Studio 2005, MSBuild, Windows Explorer, a command line / batch file, or CodeSmith itself.
- ActiveSnippets - Imagine Visual Studio 2005 snippets, but with the full power of CodeSmith available to execute any logic or access any complex metadata (including database schema and xml data) to control the output of your snippets.
- CodeSmith Maps (.csmap) - This feature will allow you to create dictionary style maps of things like SQL to C# data type mappings.
- .netTiers 2.0 - The .netTiers templates have been greatly enhanced and included with CodeSmith 4.0.
- Extended Property Management - You can now edit and add new schema extended properties inside of CodeSmith Studio.
- Property Persistence - CodeSmith now remembers the property values from the last time you executed a template.
The buzz about this release has been very positive.
Robert Hinjosa posted to his blog:
"The concept of CodeSmith Projects inside of Visual Studio is my absolute favorite, and really believe that it will change the landscape of the development process we use today. I really think some really smart folks are going to come out with some really creative ways to use CSP's. I can't wait to see them. ActiveSnippets are smokin' hot and I predict will be the feature everyone will ask, why didn't we already have that? It only makes all the sense in the world."
Jason Kolb blogged about the event as well:
"The best template-based code generator I've found so far is Codesmith, which has a big leg up on the competition because of NetTiers which is an extremely full-featured object model in the form of community-built templates.
There is a learning curve with CodeSmith, but the syntax is a familiar ASP.NET style and now with version 4.0 CodeSmith integrates directly into the Visual Studio IDE. Scott Hanselman has included CodeSmith in his Power Users Tools list for several years running.