[Note: As of 5/5/03, the functionality of CollectionGen has been sucked
into Eric
Smith’s CodeSmith. I asked Eric to take on these features because
CodeSmith does all of what CollectionGen does and more. All new feature
requests/bug reports should go his way.]
CollectionGen is
a Custom Tool Add-In to VS.NET 2002 & 2003 to generate type-safe collections. As it turns out, I did almost none of
the work. Jon Flanders figured out how to add a custom tool.
Shawn Van Ness
implemented
the template for type-safe collections. I just put it together.
CollectionGen is an add-on to generate code for type-safe collections
until we have templates in C# (likely) and VB (unlikely). The benefit of a
type-safe collection, of course, is that you can use it without having to
cast items to and from objects. Also, Shawn has been very careful to
implement a collection class that is very efficient for both reference types
and value types.
Once you’ve setup it up and defined your collections in a collection
definition file in your project, you’ll have type-safe collection classes
generated as part of your design-process, as shown here:
Figure 1: collections.xml collection definition file
Figure 2: collections.xml and generated collection.cs implementation
file
Figure 3: CollectionGen custom tool add-in associated with the
collections.xml file
Figure 4: Generate type-safe collection code
Enjoy!
Also, Atif Aziz used some of my custom tool code and built
a generic VS.NET code generator shim that allows you to build a code
generator that plugs into VS.NET by implementing a single method.
