JoeAudette.com

Wow almost a month since I've posted anything, thought I better blog something before the month ends. I've been so busy lately.  One thing I've been exploring lately is code generation tools. I've played with RapTier, CodeWise, MyGeneration, and a few others.  All of them have their strengths and can be useful tools in rapid application development. If you have a good data model already, you can point RapTier at the database and it will generate a fully functional 3 tier application (ASP.NET or Windows Forms .NET, C# or VB.NET) that is rather impressive. In the Web application, every table is represented with a DataGrid using in place editing, paging, and sorting. As with most of these tools, it generates stored procedures too. Reviewing the code that is generated by all of these tools, I find things I like and things I don't like. Of course you can modify the generated code but I'm leaning more and more toward MyGeneration as the one that is easiest for me to create my own templates and therefore generate code the way I would write it.  Its like using ASP to write code instead of html.  It comes with templates that generate fairly well architected code, but I want mine to use the SqlHelper class instead of straight ADO.NET and I want to use my own naming conventions so I am spending some time working on the templates to write code my way. I think it will be a big time saver.  I'm going to make templates for stubbing out UI, Business, and Data layer classes and stored procedures the way I would write them. I fully expect to modify them after generation, but much of the usual stuff will be automated.