Syncfusion has been providing UI components since 2001 and can be counted amongst the top component publishers like DevExpress, Telerik, Infragistics, etc. So it is no surprise to see them push out Blazor components to complement this new Microsoft Technology.

CodeStencil now has a stencil to help Syncfusion developers generate all the necessary code to kick off a Blazor project - The Syncfusion Blazor Grid Stencil.

This stencil will generate models, razor pages, services, controllers, etc. The good thing is that you have full control and configuration on how the code is generated, so you do not end up with a lot of redundant code you have to start deleting.

So, let's see how this is done.

If you do not have CodeStencil installed, you can download and install a free/trial copy from Downloads.

The new ASP .NET Razor Stencil will generate a fully working web application based on razor pages.

This stencil was created from the Contoso University tutorial on Razor Pages with Entity Framework Core. You can recreate an entire application based on your own database in less than 5 mins without writing a single line of code!

You can watch this to see how this is done

This stencil is based on the article - Developing Great Web APIs Architectures w/ ASP.NET Core 2.1 given by Chris Woodruff at QCon.

The design is based on the following and uses very good standard practices:

• Single Responsibility Principle simplifies implementation and design
• The Ports and Adapter Pattern decouples business logic from other dependencies
• Decoupled architecture makes testing much easier and more robust

This stencil will generate the same code used in this presentation. However, the beauty of stencils in CodeStencil is that you can swap and use your own database, define the name of your project, namespaces, etc. and the generated code will automatically use these.

The solution and all code from this article's examples can be found here in Chris' GitHub repository ChinookASPNETCoreAPIHex.

The stencil for this example can be downloaded from here: WebApi on github

Another application to add to your tool chest CodeStencil comes with a new approach to code generation. Even though there are a lot of tools and libraries out there being used today for code generation and scaffolding, once you have an output it isn't easy to reconfigure and have a do over without complicated changes to the original scripts/templat...

I have always been a firm believer of the saying.. "Do not reinvent the wheel". So, I am always looking for ways to speed up or cut out repetitive tasks.

The concept of CodeStencil is simple... string replacement.

CodeStencil is simply an IDE that helps you intelligently use existing code to build a stencil (or in familiar terms - a Template) that can be used to generate the same code, again, but at the same time allowing you to define the strings to replace.

From the screenshot below, NAMESPACE will be replaced by "Dolasoft" during code generation:

Unlike standard code generators, you do not need to learn a template language. If you do not want to build your Stencil from scratch, you can create it within minutes from already generated code.