Gareth Jones

Gareth is a lead developer architect in the Visual Studio Ultimate group at Microsoft. Currently, he’s working on features to help team productivity for Visual Studio customers and also drives T4 code generation across the Visual Studio product line.

Previously at Microsoft he worked on DSL Tools, the software factory initiative and Visual Studio extensibility. He has been a development manager for bespoke enterprise solutions, led the development of Microsoft’s bCentral UK small business portal and managed a consultancy team focussed on ISVs.

Before joining Microsoft, he led development projects in the intelligence analysis, simulation and aerospace industries. He’s passionate about raising the abstraction level of software tools and still looking for the next leap forward.

Session

Boost your team’s productivity – Create and share a library of code generators with Visual Studio T4

Every copy of Visual Studio comes with its own template code generation engine built in – T4. Come to this session to learn how to build up a library of productivity-enhancing code generators.

Whether you’re creating Dependency Properties in WPF or adding custom exceptions, you can reduce the boilerplate code you need to write and minimize defects along the way. But how do you share these time-savers with your team and with the community? How can you customize them without the gotchas of copy and paste reuse?

I’ll show you how to build a clean library, package it for sharing in the IDE and add extensibility points so you can customize as you go.