CodeSmith PLINQO QuickStart

This video was made for anyone else who has run across the Codesmith code generator's extension/enhancement templates for Microsoft Linq-To-SQL, called PLINQO, and may want to use it for new Visual Studio 2012, .NET f/w 4.5 projects over a SQL Server 2012 database.

It is made from the perspective of someone who knows absolutely nothing about Codesmith, and walks through step-by-step how to use Codesmith/PLINQO to generate a DAL/BLL data access class library consisting of the vanilla Linq-To-SQL framework with the PLINQO extensions on top of it. You should be familiar with Visual Studio 2012 solutions and class library projects, and how to create a basic LINQ data model (not Entity Framework).

It also covers several issues that arise when using PLINQO to target the .NET f/w 4.5, Visual Studio 2012 and SQL Server 2012 databases. Note: the latest version of CodeSmith has fixed the issue with SQL Server 2012 datatypes shown in the video; when I have time I will post an updated version of this video using Visual Studio 2013.

The video does not go into any detail on how Codesmith actually works with respect to custom code generation - more study would be required to learn how to create code generation templates within Codesmith for other purposes. The objective of this video is simply to show the step-by-step procedures required to generate a PLINQO data access class library over the AdventureWorks2012 database, and could be used as a guide to do a minimal such generation for any SQL Server 2012 database for a Visual Studio 2012, .NET f/w 4.5 scenario.