Untitled Coding Blog

This post is about generating a file reading/writting library from some sort of specifications, in this case in the form of an xml file that details the internal binary structure of the file. Using this approach, we can define the format in an xml file and create some code generating tools to write code for libraries which read and write in that format for a given language such as C++ or python. These tools will also create some models in the respective programming language that are read and populated by the generated library. This has the advantage in case the format changes we just run the tool again with the updated format from the xml file. The code for reading the format will be updated and all that we need to do is to recompile it. It also allows people who are not familiar with programming to edit the format without writing code. I am going to use an open source project called niflib which reads and write 3d models in files for games like Elder Scrolls Skyrim. You can find...

Most developers that have used Entity Framework will surely have noticed some special files in the project that end in ".tt". These files serve as blueprints for the code that is generated from the Entity Framework mappings which are stored in an xml file ending in ".edmx". A ".tt" template is similar to the ".cshtml" files used in Asp .Net MVC but instead of rendering html content it renders C# code. By editing these files we can customize how the generated code will look and behave. For example the partial ".tt" template bellow for each column in a table in the database it generates a property that implements the INotifyPropertyChanged interface to notify subscribers that the object has changed: This is applied for each column in every table. Using this code we can bind our objects directly to a Windows Presentation Foundation interface after fetching them from the database. We can also generated backing fields for that prop...