CodeSmith Generator 6.0 Beta 1 Released!

*UPDATE: CodeSmith Generator 6.0 Beta 2 has been released!*

We are thrilled to announce the release of CodeSmith Generator 6.0 Beta 1!  We feel like we are at a solid point now and would love to start getting feedback from our users.  This release will be especially interesting to anyone who is actively editing their templates or creating new templates because the editing experience has been greatly improved.

Here is a list of the major new features in this release:

• Brand new template editor integrated right into Visual Studio 2010!
• Vastly improved IntelliSense with even more improvements to come before the final release.  Support for directives, extension methods, lambdas, generics, and more!
• Brand new parsing engine that should provide much better template errors as well as a great foundation to build on for the future.
• .NET 4.0 support in templates.
• SchemaExplorer collections have been updated to use generic collections that give a bunch of new features like LINQ support.
• PropertyGrid has been updated to allow property filtering, collection editing, default instance creation, auto expanding of objects and much more.
• New default property serializer that will enable serialization of just about any object and not require custom property serializers to be written.  You can now just create an object in the template and use it as a property type.
• Brand new Template Explorer that provides complete shell context menus and other features.  If you are using something like Tortoise for version control, you will now have access to those features right inside of Template Explorer. 
• 64bit assembly support.
• Most of the engine is multi-threaded and should make better use of multiple core machines.
• Many other small improvements and bug fixes.

As you can see, we have re-written most of the core pieces of CodeSmith Generator and have given ourselves a great foundation to build on for the future.

However, there are some issues to be aware of with this beta release:

• If your templates use assemblies that are compiled against the old versions of the CodeSmith assemblies, they will need to be recompiled against the new 6.0 assemblies and will also need to target the AnyCPU platform.
• In some scenarios with a large number of templates (nettiers), 6.0 is slower than 5.x.  We will be looking into this and doing some profiling before the final release.
• Using an XmlProperty with a schema does not provide IntelliSense yet.
• Includes are not 100% working.
• Documentation has not been updated yet.

This release addresses several of the top feature requests for CodeSmith Generator. So we are REALLY excited to hear back from you guys on this release and see what you think.  If you would like to provide feedback, please send an email to feedback@codesmithtools.com or post it on our forums here.

Download CodeSmith Generator 6.0 Beta 1