Skeleton Crew is a tool designed to help you quickly build model code. It uses it's own code model to represent models, not the CodeDom. It's not designed to represent expressions and statements, just basic structure. The purpose of tools like the Pseudo.Net modeler are to allow you to easily and quickly specify your models, and render them in any language desired. Think of Pseudo.Net code as a happy medium between UML class diagrams and actual code. Many people get caught up building a UML model that takes far longer than it would to just write the code. Pseudo.Net allows you to specify the same structural design, without worrying about implementation details, and easily translates directly to code in any language. Other tools such as the XML modeler allow you to generate an XML serializable model that is virtually interchangable with XML through the models generated serializer class.

     Skeleton Crew is a code generation tool designed to save time and improve productivity by doing large amounts of work for you. It does not generate full applications, full application tiers or ready to use libraries. It generates skeleton code for you to modify. These tools can shave weeks of work off of most projects. If you know what your model will be and dread typing all your property accessors and other tedious coding tasks, Pseudo.Net can help. If you have a large XML structure that you have to work with and would much rather work with a programmable model instead of XPath queries through the XML DOM, the XML Modeler can help.

     There are four main interfaces that Skeleton Crew 2.0 employs to facilitate it's code generation.

• ICodeBuilder builds a code model from some type of input.
• ICodeTransformer modifies a code model.
• ICodeRenderer renders a code model to text.
• ICodeGenerator generates text from some type of input. They do building and rendering all in one. They don't necessarily use the code model.

     Skeleton Crew uses a proprietary code model that's only represents structure such as types and members. The code model output of an ICodeBuilder is a Package object, which contains Namespaces, which contain types. ICodeTransformers can act on either Package objects or Namespace objects, returning the same type as supplied. ICodeRenderers and ICodeGenerators both produce SourcePacks, which are analogous to files. They both have a RenderMode property that allows you to specify how to break up the content into SourcePacks.

     Below are abreviated definitions of the four interfaces, and a list of their implementations.

1: public interface ICodeBuilder {
2: 	event ProgressHandler Progress;
3: 	Package Build();
4: }

1: public interface ICodeTransformer {
2: 	event ProgressHandler Progress;
3: 	Package Transform(Package pkg);
4: 	Namespace Transform(Namespace ns);
5: }

1: public interface ICodeRenderer {
2: 	event ProgressHandler Progress;
3: 	RenderMode RenderMode { get; set; }
4: 	string IndentString { get; set; }
5: 	SourcePacks Render(Package pkg);
6: 	SourcePacks Render(Namespace ns);
7: 	SourcePack Render(IType itp);
8: }

1: public interface ICodeGenerator {
2: 	event ProgressHandler Progress;
3: 	LanguageDescription LanguageDescription { get; set; }
4: 	RenderMode RenderMode { get; set; }
5: 	SourcePacks Render();
6: }