After playing with CodeSmith for awhile, I’ve decided its one tool I’m going to come to rely on in the future. I’ve already built half a dozen templates of my own in the last few days, and have found countless others out on the internet.
So far, and I haven’t gotten super deep into it yet, but custom properties are awesome. They allow what seems to be unlimited flexibility and extensibility when coupled with the code-behind model of the templates.
I have also looked and played with CodeRush some too. For me, I didn’t get far with it. Maybe had I started with it before CodeSmith, I would have gotten deeper into it. CodeSmith was so easy to use with no knowledge of the product. Opening it up, I knew exactly what to do. CodeRush, although it appears to have better integration with Visual Studio for navigating through code and the visualization tools are pretty cool too, seems to have a bigger learning curve involved because of its feature set. The templates work differently, but appear to produce the same results as using CodeSmith.
For now, I’m going to stick with CodeSmith. The simplicity of its use combined with the efficiency and productivity is more important to me than anything right now, even if CodeRush does have a fuller feature set. The templates are easier to find for CodeSmith as well.
Keep in mind, I haven’t delved super deep into either product, so make sure to get some eval copies and check them both out for yourself.