Back in March I attended DevConnections in Orlando, and sat in one of Rob Howard's sessions on CodeSmith.  I have always had a pretty negative outlook on "code generators", because most tools don't give you enough control over what code is actually created.  I take a lot of pride in writing applications that are extremely scalable, and frankly some of the code that is generated is not as efficient or isn't as optimized for my particular application and environment as I would like.  So before I even sat down in that session, Rob already had an uphill battle to fight.

However, the tool that Rob showed us was quite different than any other code generator I had ever seen.  Simply put, CodeSmith is a template-based code generator that is commonly used to generate ORM-type architectures based on your database and settings.  The key phrase in that sentence is template-based.  There are a ton of templates available that are provided by a community and open source.  This means that you can download one of the proven architectures like .netTiers, CSLA, NHibernate, Wilson's ORMapper, or others and if something isn't coded, commented, or formatted exactly how you would like it ... you have the full ability to modify the template to your liking.  This means you don't have to write the entire architecture, but have control to change any line of generated code if you need to.  In my experience since using the product, you really don't have to mess with them too much, but it really gives me piece of mind to know that I could change the behavior instead of just having to live with whatever code the black-box generator spits out.

It is kind of hard to conceptualize what all CodeSmith has the ability to do.  It can generate C# and VB.NET code, but can also generate anything else: T-SQL, JavaScript, XML, RTF, or a language you just made up.  This was hard for me to grasp at first, but CodeSmith Studio (the IDE used to create/view/edit templates) looks and feels a look like Visual Studio.  But instead of writing code in Visual Studio that at the end of the day will become a software applications, you write code in CodeSmith Studio in a way that feels extremely similar to .NET and when you compile and run the code the output is generated code, XML, T-SQL scripts, or could even be documentation.  So it is kind of open-ended as to what you can actually use the tool to generate.  I will try to post some examples on the site sometime soon that demonstrates some of the significantly different types of things you can generate.

Bottom line of CodeSmith: This software is one of the most useful development tools I've seen.  In fact, I see CodeSmith and the RedGate Tools as must-buys for serious developers, and are almost on the same plain as Visual Studio itself.  Both of those tools are extremely reasonably priced, and the time saved developing and maintaining an app far outweigh their cost.  At the time this was written, CodeSmith Standard was $99/license, and CodeSmith Professional was $399.  For more info go to CodeSmithTools.com.