Eric and his team at
CodeSmith Tools have released version 4.0 of the popular CodeSmith.
CodeSmith 4.0 has been released today at the Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas. Here are just a few the new capabilities in CodeSmith 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.
Official Press Release
Personally I have enjoyed great productivity increases using versions 2 and 3 of CodeSmith, and hope to garner even greater benefits in version 4. Especially the CodeSmith Projects and the ActiveSnippets will be very useful to me. Couple that with partial classes in .NET 2 (and 3) and we're looking at a killer featre set.
Labels: code smith, programming, tools