Last thursday evening, may 26th, we had a great meeting of the Dutch dotned user group. Sander already wrote a detailed story on this, Frans did one as well. Here come my 2 bits.

Hosted by Atos origin in their brand new almost futusristic Utrecht office we had a meeting around the theme of code generation. With VS 2005 generating so much code it was interesting to take a deeper look at other code generating tools. Frans Bouma kicked of with a presentation on LLBLgenPro, his code generator for the data-access layer.

Frans started with a general overview O/R mappers and the different places to hook in. Having covered some theory and the position of tools around (like nHibernate) there was just about enough time to get a first impression of Frans' own tool. The LLBLgen website is full of details.

The second presentation was on the other side of the spectrum. Jeroen van Helvoort demonstrated RADvolution designer. A very nice tool to create clear and consistent windows forms. It does all that by hooking in the .NET forms designer, so you are not dependent on specific controls. At runtime one assembly has to go with your app. This takes care of things like consistent enableing/disabling of controls and user messages. You can import existing applications. For existing to clean up some mess you just inherited and have to tidy up. Jeroen has made a very nice tool.

Having seen what you can do with code generation we ended with a good discussion. These days you cannot and should not write all code by hand. Besides using a software package you can outsource the work. In the experience of most people the work done overseas is just as consistent and good quality as the result of a tool. Or just as bad. There is a lock in. When you want to tweak modifying the result of a tool or from outsourcing can be just as difficult. On the long term the tools will be the winner. In ten years time the price of an Indian or Croat developer will be the same as that of of a Western European developer. Or perhaps it will be the other way round, we will be writing code for Indian companies :) So we better make sure we have the right tools and learn to work and live with them. Fort what I've seen that will be not to much of a problem.

See you next meeting. And to mention one more reason for coming: they are fun. Great fun: