Comments on: Codesmith 4.0 Feedback and Feature Requests http://lfoust.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/codesmith-40-feedback-and-feature-requests/ Blogs are the new phonebook Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:53:56 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: Phil Bachmann http://lfoust.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/codesmith-40-feedback-and-feature-requests/#comment-882 Phil Bachmann Thu, 14 Jun 2007 23:36:12 +0000 http://lfoust.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/codesmith-40-feedback-and-feature-requests/#comment-882 Thanks for the insight into CodeSmith, Luke. I am developing a product in this area and it is encouraging to see that that you are frustrated by problems that I have already solved. To me these issues are very basic - the real challenge for code generation tools lies in adding value beyond the mere generation of code. If you are interested in conducting a serious review I will give you a free licence for my software. It is due to reach beta at the end of June. Check out the developer notes on my website at www.sbutton.com, I'd appreciate your thoughts. Thanks for the insight into CodeSmith, Luke. I am developing a product in this area and it is encouraging to see that that you are frustrated by problems that I have already solved.

To me these issues are very basic – the real challenge for code generation tools lies in adding value beyond the mere generation of code.

If you are interested in conducting a serious review I will give you a free licence for my software. It is due to reach beta at the end of June.

Check out the developer notes on my website at http://www.sbutton.com, I’d appreciate your thoughts.

]]> By: Luke Foust http://lfoust.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/codesmith-40-feedback-and-feature-requests/#comment-820 Luke Foust Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:37:19 +0000 http://lfoust.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/codesmith-40-feedback-and-feature-requests/#comment-820 Eric, Thank you for your reply. It shows what a stand up company you guys are that you respond to customers feedback in such a professional manner. Would it help with the Visual Studio Integration if you were to restrict the code to just one language? That is a limitation that we have with all other VS project types and is something that I would gladly live with if it meant better integration. Eric,

Thank you for your reply. It shows what a stand up company you guys are that you respond to customers feedback in such a professional manner.

Would it help with the Visual Studio Integration if you were to restrict the code to just one language? That is a limitation that we have with all other VS project types and is something that I would gladly live with if it meant better integration.

]]> By: Eric J. Smith http://lfoust.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/codesmith-40-feedback-and-feature-requests/#comment-819 Eric J. Smith Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:31:41 +0000 http://lfoust.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/codesmith-40-feedback-and-feature-requests/#comment-819 Luke, Thank you for the feedback. Here are some comments on your feedback. 1. Visual Studio Integration, this is a really hard one because the VS editor doesn't support nested languages merged at run-time which is what we are doing since your template and target language could be any combination of languages. We could bring the editor control we are using into VS, but it's no small undertaking. In fact, it would be a massive effort and in the end the only difference would be that you could edit your templates in VS. It's not exactly a big selling point for the huge investment we would have to make into this feature. The other big problem with this one is that we'd have to maintain two IDE's since we don't want to require that you own VS to use CodeSmith. 2. IntelliSense is definitely not an easy feature to implement. We've tried to do a good job, but you are right in that there are too many scenerios that the feature fails. We will be working to improve on these scenerios in the future. The biggest thing to keep in mind here is that we are cheating to get IntelliSense by compiling the template and then using reflection. So if your template doesn't compile or you've added new things to your codebehind file and haven't compiled those changes yet, you will run into issues. 3. The assembly locking thing is also something that we are planning to address in the future. Thanks, Eric J. Smith Luke,

Thank you for the feedback. Here are some comments on your feedback.

1. Visual Studio Integration, this is a really hard one because the VS editor doesn’t support nested languages merged at run-time which is what we are doing since your template and target language could be any combination of languages. We could bring the editor control we are using into VS, but it’s no small undertaking. In fact, it would be a massive effort and in the end the only difference would be that you could edit your templates in VS. It’s not exactly a big selling point for the huge investment we would have to make into this feature. The other big problem with this one is that we’d have to maintain two IDE’s since we don’t want to require that you own VS to use CodeSmith.

2. IntelliSense is definitely not an easy feature to implement. We’ve tried to do a good job, but you are right in that there are too many scenerios that the feature fails. We will be working to improve on these scenerios in the future. The biggest thing to keep in mind here is that we are cheating to get IntelliSense by compiling the template and then using reflection. So if your template doesn’t compile or you’ve added new things to your codebehind file and haven’t compiled those changes yet, you will run into issues.

3. The assembly locking thing is also something that we are planning to address in the future.

Thanks,
Eric J. Smith

]]>