MSBUILD and Codegen

MSBuild and the code generation techniques of Kathleen Dollard seem to fit together very naturally.

MSBuild is a blatant clone of NAnt with the benefit of being the native project file format of VS2005.

Kathleen Dollard promotes the use of code generation (generated code = meta data + templates) using XSLT.

Kathleen has a complex code generation harness that provides configurable one touch code generation.

I feel that this would be more naturally implemented as a set of MsBuild/Nant extensions.

For example the Database Metadata extraction tool would be one task. Stored procedure generation would be another. Code to call the stored procedures would be a third. This would provide the one touch benefit of the generation framework yet allow the pieces to become far more flexible.

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