Blake Niemyjski My Personal Blog

I had spent considerable time trying to open a new document window and then set the document text to the result of the generated template text. I found this to be an almost impossible task and proposed this on the Microsoft Visual Studio Extensibility forums . The response that I got was that after looking into this functionality the best approach would be to save the text to a file and then open the document window. " I looked into this, I think trying to open one of the built in editors, in a normal editor tab populated with data that does not exist on disk is going to be a pointless battle...

While implementing a custom CodeSmith Generator Template Editor into Visual Studio 2010 . I ran into an issue with getting the GoTo Line functionality to work properly. According to Microsoft this functionality needs to be provided by the custom editor as well as the GoTo Line dialog will need to be implemented as there is no "official public extension point". This makes sense if you are taking over control of the editor but I feel that Microsoft should expose this dialog. I was able to implement this functionality by adding a command to the IMenuCommandService. var mcs = GetService(...

We are very excited to announce that CodeSmith Generator 6.0 will feature a built-in Visual Studio CodeSmith Generator Template Editor on top of our existing Visual Studio Integration . The team has been hard at work integrating a new Template Editor into our Visual Studio integration story. Without further ado: As you can see from the screenshot above, the CodeSmith Generator Template Editor is sitting inside of Visual Studio. This means you can use a familiar Development Interface to develop, edit and generate templates. Also noticeable is our new property grid which replaces the visual studio...

The following guide will walk you through the basics on how-to extend the CodeSmith Generator PLINQO Templates to fit your custom development needs. In this example we will create a new Webpage for each entity that we generate. This page will contain a LinqDataSource control and an ASP.NET GridView control that will display data from a corresponding entity that we generated. I always recommend that you use the PLINQO API when writing templates that interact with code generated by PLINQO as this ensures that the code generated has the proper names and associations and or types. Find relevant templates...

Every now and then I need to create a new Oracle user to test the CodeSmith Generator OracleSchemaProvider. I wanted to outline the steps that I use to create a new user as well as change the password of an existing user. The first step one needs to take is to create a new user but you may not remember your login information if it has been a while. At this point I always open up SQL Plus from the start menu and enter in the following user name when prompted. / as sysdba This allows you to connect as the sysdba user without remembering any credentials. Please note that the passwords and/or steps...

I have read many technical books over the years and this is one is one of those books that you know you better keep handy. I really like how Robert has this book laid out and how he introduces you to Silverlight. I’ve been a .NET guy since version 1.0. But like most developers, I haven’t had the chance to really dive into Microsoft’s latest technologies like Silverlight until they have a few versions released. I found that the book is laid out very nicely; the first few chapters will introduce you to the tools (Visual Studio 2010). Then it will lead you into what Silverlight is...

In the following example, I'll show you how to use the CodeSmith Generator CSLA template's powerful renaming options. Many of you might have a legacy database with those ugly prefixes, or things you wish you could refactor but just can't. Luckily, you're in luck as CodeSmith Generator is going to save the day once again! By default we will strip any invalid characters from your property names like prefixed digits etc... Please note that these methods also work for renaming class names, but there are other methods that we will cover later that are is the recommended way to specify...

In the previous article on how to use the partial methods in the CodeSmith Generator CSLA templates to preserve custom code mostly focused on the code side of things. For those of you who might be using Stored Procedures might be wondering... How do I accomplish preserving my custom stored procedure logic? Don't worry, CodeSmith already though of this and didn't leave you out in the dark! The CSLA templates by default will not automatically execute the generated stored procedures but it can! To do this you need to set the AutoExecuteStoredProcedures property to True. Now, when your database...

One of the best features of code generation is the reality of being able to actively generate you code while preserving custom changes. This allows you to implement custom logic while constantly making changes to your metadata and getting the latest template changes. CodeSmith Generator has worked hard on making this happen in both the PLINQO and CSLA Templates . The CSLA templates offer many partial method overrides to make your life easier. It is recommended that you place any partial methods that you implement in the non-generated partial class; this is always the ClassName.cs or ClassName.vb...

I came across this bug last night , which was occurring right as CSLA 4 was released. It had to deal with the CodeSmith CSLA templates when you set UseMemberVariables to true. The error is quite obscure and not very intuitive as the signs of a bug are only found when you check to see if your business object IsValid. The scenario in this case is when you set a required managed property, the rules never fully evaluate the set value. A bunch of other side effects could occur as well. Here is the error you could receive: CategoryId required Expected: True But was: False Here is the code that was causing...