Announcing Wyam
I am very proud to announce my newest project, Wyam. It's a static site and content generator built from the ground up to be modular and flexible.
Using the .NET Compiler Platform in T4 Templates
T4 templates provide a powerful way to generate code at design time (and sometimes at compile time if you set up Visual Studio appropriately). The traditional way of accessing the code of your solution from within a T4 template is to get the Visual Studio API (called DTE). This has always seemed like a bit of a kludge to me and feels a little too far removed from the code and what it represents. We now have another option by using the .NET Compiler Platform from within a T4 template to parse, query, and output content based on the files in our solution.
Identity Crisis
Inspired by notable tech personalities like Scott Hanselman and John Sonmez who place a lot of emphasis on "personal brand", I've recently been thinking about my own personal brand. Because the username I used was common enough that I wasn't always the first to claim it, I ended up with a lot of slightly different usernames across different platforms. I was somedave on GitHub and Stack Overflow, @somedaveg on Twitter, somedavedg on Reddit, etc. and my website was somedave.com. I'm not nearly notable enough for this to make much of a difference (fun experiment, try Googling just "Scott"), but it bothered me none the less. When someone puts my username in a GitHub issue, I want that to also point to my Twitter handle, etc. Not to mention, my various usernames didn't really identify me. There was no real indication of who was behind them other than someone named Dave. And maybe one day, it actually will make a difference. So I set out to set things right.