CodeSmith Review

Most of my coding happens to be repetitive. Therefore I'm always thinking there's got a be a way to generate the similar code and rename the classes and various attributes. While I was on David Hayden's site http://www.davidhayden.com/, I saw an ad for Codesmith. After reviewing the features and asking a few folks in the IT world what they thought about it, I decided to give it a try. Instantly I fell in love with it because of it's ease of use and I was instantly productive straight out of the box! Here's some things I was able to do:
Generate Code based on database schema - using included examples
Port my own code into a template for re-use
Generate both VB and C# Code

The possibilities are endless, you can create libraries of code you are confident works and you wish to reuse over and over. There's a handy properties pane similar to the one in Visual Studio that you can use to change the custom properties you define in the template file. Once the template file is written, all that's required is setting a few properties in the properties pane and generating the code.

There's a few videos to help you get started on the Codesmith website http://www.codesmithtools.com/ . I highly recommend the product if you find yourself writing similar code all day. Hey, you can do a days work in 5 minutes once the template is in place! Look good all day while hardly breaking a sweat. It is a bit pricey for those, like me that are buying this themselves for around $400, but worth it in time savings.