In CodeSmith Generator 6.0, we made some changes that will help users who are using exclusive checkout version control systems like TFS, Vault and SourceSafe. In the past, if you generated a bunch of files using CodeSmith Generator, it would overwrite the file contents and change the modified date on files even if the generated content was exactly the same as the existing content. This would cause the version control system to checkout every single file and treat them as if they were changed and needed to be checked in. Most version control systems would then see that the content hadn’t actually changed and ignore the check-in request, but it was still a pain when you went to check-in and would see hundreds of modified files in the list.

We also went through a big round of testing to make sure that everything works as expected using the exclusive checkout systems inside of Visual Studio. When you make a change to a .csp file, it is automatically checked out as you would expect. We tried to make sure everything works as smoothly as possible.

Please let us know if these changes are helping you and if you see any other areas that can be improved.