The scaffolding style code generators that generate out a good starting point from which standard coding takes over, those are very useful.

The Microsoft brand “design surface” based code generators (TableAdapters,WSSF) where the uml diagram of a class needs to be edited, rather than the actual class, those are more harm than good. if fact they slow development way down.

The design surface itself, is not necessarily a bad concept. it is just a GUI over top of a XML document. Just don’t use it to generate repetitive code. If code is repetitive, factor it out until its DRY. Don’t break out the code generators.

David Cookery did a short write up of my AOP caching framework on infoQ. As a result downloads and usage have spiked.

You have made a project using attribute based caching, but the cache isn’t being hit?

Generic Hierarchical Meta data is cool! There are many ways to implement it with a standard relational database. Most of them are considered anti-patterns, but sometimes we need to optimize for flexibility, not raw database performance. Here are some of my notes on the subject:

Attribute Based Caching 1.2 has been Released. It’s still the .net only caching library that has declarative cache invalidation.

Attribute Based Caching 1.1 had almost 100 downloads! Release 1.2 contains some small improvements like disk based cache and a time-to-live setting.

Cache 1.2