Developing For .NET

I have posted an update to the PropertyBuilder code. Actually, the code hasn’t changed but the solution now includes a Setup Project. I also put a copy of the MSI file in the root PropertyBuilder directory, so if you just want the tool and don’t want to worry with the code you can just install it and use it locally.

There were a couple of things about the code I failed to mention in the previous post. First, it uses Compile Time Directives to branch the code into different groups based on a Defined variable. I’ll have to write a post about this – it is a neat way to test variations and modifications to code. Currently, the code is using Regex.Replace() to make its changes, but the original version was a bit more brute force and was left in place to show the differences between the two approaches. The Regex version also takes advantages of templates rather than inline strings. On the Code Generation front, these templates could come from anywhere, such as external text files, XML, settings, or even a database.

The one thing I don’t like about the tool is that it always places the variable declaration directly above the property. I’m a bit anal about stuff like that, and I like to have all my class level variables defined before the constructor, so having it inline like that grates on my nerves. In a future version, I am going to add a split panel option to generate the variables in one textbox and the properties in a separate textbox. That way they can easily be copied and pasted separately into my code at the appropriate places.

Now what would be REALLY cool is to be able to integrate this with Visual Studio and provide the option to select a variable and automatically generate the Property from the variable, kind of like the inheritance and constructor stubbing we already have. But truth be told, I’ll probably never have time to figure all that out.