Schedule that meeting to talk to your boss about a raise.  CodeSmith Tools will show you exactly how much it is saving your company.  Well almost.  If you pull up the About dialog form, it will show you lines it has generated and use its advanced calculation (Lines generated / Average lines of code per hour) * Average cost per hour.  As you can see from the screen shot I have saved my company almost $80K!  I don’t think it is too much to ask for just 10% of that J

While for new code generation it is more useful, it keeps adding the lines every time you re-generate the code.  So you could sit there and click on the “generate outputs” a few dozen times and easily add some zeros to the end of that number.

I am a huge believer in code generation.  My golden rule for code generation is to never edit generated code, so after you are done coding, you can reset the counter, re-generate, and then your number should be a good representation of what you generated and most importantly, your savings!   While you might not get a raise it does show some interesting numbers and its more evidence to show the benefits of code generation.

Code Smart Not Hard!

Mike

A little over a year ago I presented at the Omaha.NET User Group meeting about using CSLA.NET and Codesmith.   My team and I have been using these two products together in a project for over a year now.   I absolutely believe these two products have contributed to the success of the projects.  

CSLA.NET gives us

• Unlimited Undo
• Binding to UI Controls
• Base Collection and Editable Objects with CRUD
• Broken rules notification to client via IDataErrorInfo
• Remoting / Direct Data Access with only config change
• much more!

We extended CSLA and features provided by our templates

• Standard business rules through extended properties in SQL Server like MinLength, MaxLength, ReadOnly, IsRequired, etc
• Custom business rules for any property by overriding AddCustomBusinessRules()
• Add any custom code in partial classes
• Parent object can contain 0 to many children collections
• CRUD stored procs are generated
• Load Multiple levels at once so that there is only one round trip to the server
• Created SortedFilteredView object to act like a DataView
• Custom column formatting for grids in our business objects

Take a look at the zip file attached.   I included the demo and the slides I used in the presentation.

CSLA2Demo.zip (1.34 MB)

If you have any questions or comments you can email me at  mike *at* doitconsultants.com

Mike

Welcome to my blog.  I plan to blog about a lot of things but most of them will have to do with ways to quickly solve business problems and not worry about redundant code and standard technical plumbing.  I will write about my experiences with code generation tools, business object frameworks, and libraries and how they help in an agile development environment.

I am currently the lead developer on a project team developing two smart client applications.  We have used several key tools to help speed development and spend more time solving business problems instad the technical ones.  We use Rocky Lhotka's CSLA.NET for our buisness object framework.  We have created CodeSmith templates to generate our business objects based on table schema.  I will get in to more details in future posts.

Mike