Eric J. Smith's Weblog

We are currently working on dogfooding the new template editor by updating and building some new templates. Along the way, we are trying to find and fix as many pain points as we possibly can. We are also working on profiling and memory usage reductions and trying to get everything running smoothly for the final release.

It’s been a long time coming, but CodeSmith Generator 6.0 Beta 1 has finally been released today!  I think a lot of people believe CodeSmith Tools is a lot bigger than we actually are (there are only 4 of us currently), but we have been working hard on this release for about 8 months now and it is pretty close to a complete rewrite.  We have rewritten the entire engine, lexer, parser, property grid, editor, intellisense, and then integrated it all right into Visual Studio 2010!

I thought the best way to show our progress so far would be to show you a quick video of the new editor in action. So without further adieu, here is the new CodeSmith Generator 6.0 editor:

Work on Generator 6.0 is progressing pretty nicely. We are code complete on our new parser, new compiler, new caching mechanism, out of process template execution, and WPF based property grid. There is a lot to talk about there, but I have also started working on implementing IntelliSense and I wanted to talk about that today.

In this post I’m going to talk about how the new template parser in CodeSmith Generator 6.0 creates an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) and then uses the visitor pattern to iterate over the nodes in the AST and do transformations.

I am currently working on the new parser for CodeSmith Generator 6.0.  When I wrote the original template parser back in 2004, I really had no idea what I was doing. :-)  I had no idea what an AST was or what an LL(*) parser was, etc.  That being said, I think I did an OK job and it has certainly served it’s purpose, but it can’t be easily changed and things are more complicated than they need to be.

CodeSmith Tools is excited to announce the upcoming release of our new product, CodeSmith Insight, and we would like to invite you to come celebrate! Join us at the Addison Conference Center‎ on Tuesday, October 12th, from 6pm to 9pm, for the:

This Thursday July 9th, Shannon Davidson and Tom DuPont will be talking about PLINQO at the Dallas .NET Users Group at Microsoft's Las Colinas Office in Irving, Texas.