Practical Code Generation in .NET: Covering Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010

Chapter 1. Introducing Code Generation

In this chapter:

• Repetitive Code: Your History

• Benefits of Code Generation

• When to Use Code Generation

• Best Practices in Code-Generation Solutions

• Code-Generation Process

• Code-Generation Tools

• Model-Driven Architecture, Declarative Programming, and Code Generation

You’re already using code generation. A lot. You just don’t know it.

If you’ve ever dragged a control onto a form then you’ve been letting Visual Studio and .NET generate code for you. If you’ve ever added a DataSet to an application (or, for the more up to date, added an ADO.NET Entity Data Model to an application) then you’ve been using code generation. For both DataSets and Entity Data Models, Visual Studio has used the tools ...