Baby Steps to Code Generation

Write code snippets today and you can roll them into more robust code generation templates later.

Goal: get to the point where you click one button and the code for your whole app is written for you automatically.

Reality: Most business problems are more complex than just performing CRUD operations on a single table at a time, and I haven’t found a solution that can autogenerate such complex logic.

In the mean time, I’m finding the Code Snippets feature in VS 2005 to be a step in the right direction. The best part is that there is little to no effort lost in creating snippets as you go. If you later decide to go with a template-based code generator like CodeSmith.  When that time comes, you can use a little regEx magic to roll up those snippets into more robust templates.