20 November 2003

Code Generation Take 2

Visual Studio Home: Part I: Creating Enterprise Templates (Visual Studio Enterprise Tools)
An interesting article. It covers a few hands-on walkthrough on:
1) Static Prototypes. As its name suggested, everything (namespace, class name, solution structure etc) is static and predefined.
2) Enforce some coding practice though the Policy File by Template Description Language (TDL). This topic is not necessarily tied up to prototyping.
3) Subproject Wizards.

MSDN also has a few walkthoughs on creating custom templates.
But not being very useful to what I want to do.

1) Define template project structure: sub-folders, policies, class files. This is achievable with enterprise template as walkthough above.
2) Dynamically create class file (name, contnet - namespace, classname etc). Need to figure out a way to create file name on the fly. say, by using wizard to allow user to specific it.
3) Consume Request/Reply XML doc to create Request/Reply class type and serialisation/de-serialisation.

By getting to point 3, we can say it is full-automatic codeGen.