We are very excited to announce the release of CodeSmith Generator 6.0!  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 support for directives, extension methods, lambdas, generics, and more!
• Improved Syntax Highlighting and Template Output Highlighting support.
• 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.
• PropertyGrid has been updated to allow property filtering, collection editing, default instance creation, auto expanding of objects and much more.
• Added Go to Definition and View Code support!
• SchemaExplorer collections have been updated to use generic collections that give a bunch of new features like LINQ support.
• 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.
• New Visual Studio Item templates to help you create templates faster.
• Added Code Navigation support. 
• Unified Generation Experience!
• Improved documentation for Generator 6.0.
• Added the ability to automatically generate Xml documentation inside of your templates by typing ''' or /// before a property or method.
• Many other small improvements and bug fixes.

Please click here for the full change log of everything that has changed in CodeSmith Generator 6.x. 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 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.
• Using an XmlProperty with a schema does not provide IntelliSense 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 would like to see in a future release. Please feel free to contact support or leave a leave a comment on our forums.

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