So I'm sitting here in Scott Hanselman's BoF about Code Generation and it is hard to type and even harder to pay attention because I keep laughing. Scott is a wonderfully fully presenter and his interaction with the audience is stellar.

We talked about a variety of code generation techniques... CodeDOM, GenX, XML, CodeSmith, etc.

There was a huge discussion led by John Lam about why he doesn't like XML. He generally felt that there was a significant "angle bracket" tax on the maintenance and production of XML. He felt that customized languages and parsers were better.

From there the discussion went into some interesting lands. Some people felt that John was leading us to a good place. Others felt that this was just going back to the 80's. There wasn't a whole lot of consensus but it was a fun and lively discussion.