Background Back in 2004, I was doing some code-generation work as part of the OBIWAN project. When I started, CodeDom was being used to do the work, but I really didn’t like it because it made the generator code very hard to read and modify. Realistically, I would not need to support any other language than C#, so I started looking for alternatives. CodeSmith was very popular at the time for generating type-safe collections (.NET 2.0 generics didn’t exist yet), but it was targeted at one-shot generations,[...]

I have  a love-hate relationship with WPF. I think it is several orders of magnitude better than Windows Forms and gives developers a tremendous expressive power to materialize their ideas into good user interfaces. I wouldn’t dream of doing many of the things I was able to do in just a few weeks in the Agile Platform IDE in any other UI framework, even if I was given months. It’s like going from plain C to C# 4. But even though the concept is really good, the quality and completeness of the concrete[...]

My blog was running in SubText, but I’ve recently changed to BlogEngine.NET. The main reason for the change was that BlogEngine.NET supports storing the data in plain XML files, without having any dependency to a database. This makes it really easy to customize, as I can develop everything in my local machine, and then just send the files to the server. With SubText this was harder to do, so I ended up doing fewer tweaks, and doing them directly in production, which I didn’t like. The migration wasn’t [...]