ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio® 2008: Problem - Design - Solution

13.1. Problem

As a developer, you are supposed to create systems to make business processes more efficient. Well, now it's time to help yourself out by writing a code generator that can handle up to 80 percent of the repetitive code needed for the stored procedures, data classes, and business classes. Once you have a code generator in place, you can concentrate on more important things — like playing golf or creating your own blog. If you're really lucky, you work in a shop that measures performance by the number of lines of code you write. You could be making ten times your current salary by the end of the year with a code generator!

This chapter builds a code generator that can be accessed through the Add New Item menu option in the Solutions Explorer. The code generator will enable you to choose a table and generate an SQL file for the stored procedures, a data class, an edit object class, and an edit object list class. I can tell you from experience that code generators save you a tremendous amount of time, and it is worth investing some time into creating your own code generator even if you don't use the pattern in this book.