Kathleen Dollard

Code generation has the potential to revolutionize application development. Rather than handcrafting each piece of code, enterprises will increasingly turn to code generation based on templates and application of business logic to automatically generate code to perform a variety of tasks.

Code Generation in Microsoft .NET presents the fundamentals of code generation. Code generation is already used extensively in Visual Studio .NET – every form-based application contains potentially hundreds of lines of “wizard” created code, which is modified as the developer sets various properties. Strongly typed datasets, XML schemas and web service proxies are also generated automatically by Visual Studio. This results in a huge cost savings and improvement in software reliability.

Developers need both the technical details of how to accomplish code generation in .NET as well as a coherent series of steps to follow to incorporate code generation into their development. Code Generation in Microsoft .NET teaches developers how to adopt these techniques in their own development efforts. To accomplish this, this book introduces a series of five steps that leverage code generation both within and between projects in the organization. The mechanics of code generation introduced in the book are organized around these steps, and provide the tools to leverage code generation for significant payback on the very first application where it is used.