Hey... you haven't been doing a whole lot of VB.NET stuff lately...

This is a comment I received from someone in passing last week. Looking around, I have to agree with them. :-( Not trying to make excuses, but I can say that my spare time lately has been very sparse with several projects. But, now that I’ve been made aware of the lack of material being made available, I can attempt to improve on this situation.

One of the things that I’m working on right at this very moment is a pet project to assist Eric Smith with some of the templates that are shipped with CodeSmith. I’ve finished the conversion of the C# template for the strongly-typed ArrayList template and am currently implementing it within a real project to test the accuracy of the conversion. Once this is completed, I will work with Eric to get this template-ized and added to the CodeSmith distribution. Seeing an example of the potential improvement in performance between a collection created using CollectionBase and one using ArrayList, I can tell you that this extra work can be worth it. However, in order to create this class, there’s a lot of code involved and this is where a code generation product can be handy. I have to also admit that I’ve been very reluctant to joining the code generation bandwagon, but in the case of creating strongly-typed arrays… I’m on board with this one ;-)

When will this be finished? Well, I expect the testing of the produced class to be completed by the end of the week in a project that I’m currently working on. From there, as I haven’t actually done anything with the templates in CodeSmith, it’s hard for me to say exactly when it will be ready in the template format - hopefully Eric will have some time to assist me in this area ;-)

I’m also going to resurrect the Color Your Console example to put some finishing touches on it with the improvements that I’ve made after uploading the previous example.