Byteflux Sebastian Negomireanu's Weblog

Easy creation of code generators in Visual Studio 2008

I am a big fan of the DRY principle. This means that whenever I can do something that can be reused with minimal or no effort, I try to do it. Recently I’ve started developing a REST framework for our projects, which is not based on WCF (will blog about this too). One of the most problematic areas is how to create service proxies easily without having to duplicate loads of code, but at the same time maintain maximum flexibility. After going through several options, the most attractive is creating a Visual Studio custom code generator.

Since there are almost no resources (and the existing ones are very blurry) I’ve decided to create a series of blogs that will be a guide to creating custom code generators, followed by some other posts with real examples and solutions to problems.

The series is divided into four parts:

Part I (this one) – creating a Visual Studio Package

Part II – creating and registering a code generator

Part III – generating code & debugging

Part IV - creating the setup project and deploying the package

*DISCLAIMER* - Even if everybody is in the new VS2010 hype, I still think there are a lot of developers that are and will be working in VS2008 for a while.