Chapter 8: Generating Code

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[F]or if you press a piece of underwear soiled with sweat together with some wheat in an open mouth jar, after about 21 days the odor changes, and the ferment coming out of the underwear and penetrating through the husks of the wheat changes the wheat into mice. But what is more remarkable is that mice of both sexes emerge (from the wheat) and these mice successfully reproduce with mice born naturally from parents…. But what is even more remarkable is that the mice which came out were not small mice… but fully grown.

—Jean-Baptiste van Helmont

Overview

Software is not, unfortunately, as easy to generate spontaneously as mice. But it need not be as difficult as many developers make it, either. Every developer writes code from scratch, building new functionality out of thin air. Some write code using cut and paste, blithely ignoring good maintainability practices in their haste to finish a project. However, a growing number of developers these days are turning to code generators—programs that will write the code for you. Although code generators aren’t new, they’ve become more popular in recent years, thanks in part to the ease of integrating them with modern development environments such as .NET. In this chapter, I’ll briefly survey the code-generation landscape, and talk a bit about how this trend fits into the .NET landscape.

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