RTM on top of Whidbey Beta2 (and an ode to Code Generation)!!!

“Our application was just deployed in production on top of Whidbey Beta2!!! In addition to being a Whidbey success story, our application is a showcase for code generation techniques (and the great CodeSmith 2.6). In our DataAccess layer (about 4000 lines of code), a total of 10 lines were written by hand and that too to retrieve DB connection strings from configuration files. If we had been building on top of 1.1, we would have even bigger numbers for autogenerated lines of code) -- Whidbey generics eliminate the need to write code to create specialized collections of objects. In addition, we used xsd schemas to generate partial classes that were later extended using hand written code. If you ask me, creating a XSD file is much easier than defining a class and defining a whole bunch of get / set props (well, arguably the Whidbey IDE makes it trivial, but you get the point). The XSDs were processed using xsd.exe and XsdObjectGen (from MS). Both of these tools generate code from XSD definitions, but they work slightly differently. In addition, we used a couple of small homegrown tools to slightly tweak the output using regex (to change the generated class to "partial" for instance). Also, it's pretty worthwhile to have a tool that generates code intelligently based on some of timestamp mechanism so that build doesn't take a long time.”

[ RTM on top of Whidbey Beta2 (and an ode to Code Generation)!!! ]