Over the last month or so I've been working on an Add-in for Visual Studio 2008 which will generate scaffolded Views and a Controller using Linq To Sql. I took my time with it as I wanted to leverage all of the goodness that I've learned from the MVC Storefront, and as of today I think it's ready to see the light of day.
This is a Prototype
Visual Studio may crash when you use this (hopefully not - I think I have it fairly stable). I've really tried to focus on "robustness" here but I'm not an "Addin Guy" per se. These bits are prototypes but "they work on my machine" so hopefully you will find this useful.
The goal of releasing this right now is to get your feedback. I'd like to see if I can answer some questions right up front, however:
- I didn't use SubSonic because IQueryable isn't ready to go. In addition, a LOT of people use Linq To Sql and the goal here is to help as many people as I can. But I WILL be plugging in an option to use SubSonic.
- You can change the code templates with your own bits - they are in the install folder in the "Templates" directory.
- I want to generate tests as well, but need more time to figure it out. I know this is important - and any help anyone wants to provide this way is great.
- This is Preview 5 only and I will update it with the next push (please be ready to uninstall it.
- This is way pre-release, so if you find a bug email me about it (robcon).
You can download the Addin Here (MSI Installer). I will be updating this a lot - so you may want to check back from time to time.
UPDATE: Scott Hanselman called to let me know that my installer is assuming that Addins go in [PersonalFolder]\Visual Studio 2008\Addins and for him, that's not the case. So I've uploaded a "binaries only" zip that you can get here - just unzip and drop into your Addins folder, wherever you put it.
UPDATE 2: My MSI Installer, for some reason, was not including a required DLL. This was fixed as of 10/7/2008 2:40 PDT and reloaded.
Many thanks to anyone who wants to test-drive this for me. And if you'd like to know what it does and what it is, here's (as usual) a video walkthrough (double-click for full screen, or download the video here)
Points to anyone who knows the soundtrack :).
