Chapter 14: Be Your Team's Hero with CodeGenHero

Too frequently, teams lack the headcount, senior talent, or software process methodology discipline necessary to succeed with enterprise projects. And by succeed, I mean managing a project so that it progresses sustainably and gets delivered in a reasonable – time period and on budget.

What if we could improve our chances of success by leveraging code that outputs code itself—in other words, take a small input, such as a database connection string, and use it to output a large number of coordinated class files that serve a targeted purpose? That is the general idea behind code generators, such as CodeGenHero™, the Visual Studio extension that we examine in this chapter. We will see how this tool can reverse-engineer information about the tables, fields, and data types in a database. It uses that schema metadata to automatically generate a fully functioning REpresentational State Transfer application programming...