"CodeSmith allows you to create templates that will generate code for any ASCII based language. The code generated can be customized by the use of properties. A property can be any .NET object that has a designer (most built in .NET types have designers already) and can be as simple as a boolean property that allows you to conditionally add or remove code from the result, to an object such as the included TableSchema object which provides everything you could possibly want to know about a table in a database. Having access to this information allows you to generate things such as stored procedures, business objects, presentation layer code, or anything else you can think of based on a table schema." This looks like a promising code-gen tool, and I've seen more than my share...

From Ben Houston: This simple wrapper, written in Managed C++, allows for developers to make use of NVIDIA's new Cg shader language from within a C# or VB.NET application. It is simple to use with existing OpenGL wrappers such as Llyod Dupond's CsGL. A sample application that makes use of OpenGL and Cg via C#, ExoEngine, is available for download on the same site.

My friend and author of Pragmatic ADO.NET has released a package of his tools to the community, including: -A general library of ADO.NET utilities -A new release of my Improved DataSet Generator -A Stored Procedure Wrapper Class Generator Shawn says that contributions are welcome.

I'm not much of a graphics programmer, but I know folks have been anxiously awaiting DX9, which includes MDX (Managed DirectX) the managed API to DirectX for .NET programmers. This release provides a bunch of non-.NET enhancements as well.

I got a very nice email today from Ross Lambert:

“I’m a new fan of yours, both in terms of your technical abilities and the down-home honesty of your columns in The Spout. I loved ‘Of Eggs and Omelets’, mostly because I could identify with it. My own career has been littered with a lot of broken eggs. I ran my own little software company for nearly 10 years, writing and selling developer libraries for Macintosh developers. Needless to say, the ups and downs of that market were fairly impossible to survive.

So now I am enjoying the Dark Side, as Mac folks would say. I’m a total  .NET-head, hence my fairly recent acquaintance with your work.

Anyway, all that to say ‘Don’t let the turkeys get you down.’ I was a pretty decent marketer; I still write ad copy for different folks from time to time. It was the only way I could manage to survive as long as I did. For what it is worth, I think your approach is innovative and fun. A few anal people will object (it sounds like they already have), but I’ve come to the conclusion that about 2% of the population actually enjoys being uptight and offering angry complaints. You’ll never make those folks happy, and it is just as well to give them a reason to bail out early in the game.”

Thanks for that, Ross. While Of Eggs and Omelets speaks of breaking eggs as metaphor for the negative feedback I’ve gotten from my recent series of marketing-related emails, in truth only a tiny fraction of folks complained. In fact, almost 10% of my newsletter subscribers responded to my inquires in some positive way, which is about 50x the number of people that had something negative to say. According to the marketing guy, getting a 10% response was about 3x what he was hoping for (although he didn’t tell me his expectations until *after* the results were in… : ). Even more telling was the large number of people that actually thanked us for asking. Apparently expressing interest in their wants and needs was unique for a surprising number of people. Further, the shear number of people interested in the various ideas we proposed (like the .NET War College and the WinForms PhoneCon) was only overshadowed by the number of people with good ideas that we didn’t even think of (which is what lead to Ask The Wonk).

So, while I may have broken some eggs, and every one of those emails physically pained me (how do spammers do it?!?), Ross and tons of others have encouraged me to keep on making my omelet.

From Hun Boon Teo: A master dissertation by Howard Kim from Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin. His paper covers topics such as AOP(AspectJ,Hyper/J) in Java and .NET (CLAW,AOP#), comparision of the different implementations for both platforms. A alpha version of the implementation can be downloaded from http://aosd.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/AspectCSharp/AspectCSharpHomepage.htm

From Jesse Ezell: "We've just announced our .NET Jabber SDK for Mono. Our SDK now lets .NET developers build cross platform instant messaging applications that target Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows CE, and Windows Pocket PC 2002. This release also supports multiple character sets such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Italian."

From John Bristowe: Six new specifications released! They are WS-Policy, WS-PolicyAttachment, WS-PolicyAssertions, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConversation! Oh my!