I upgraded my aged 2.0 license to 3.0 CodeSmith Professional today. $49 bucks.
During the purchase a $99 Premier Support add-on checkbox was checked, which made the purchase process confusing and more scammy-feeling than my pleasant 2.0 purchasing experience was. Premier Support added "major and minor upgrades for a year and access to technical support with 2 business day response." What about those of us who don't want to pay $159 for an upgrade when adding in the "Premier" stuff? Do we continue to get minor upgrades as in the past?
And beware, Activation has arrived to CodeSmith. Eric Smith created Something Great, and I don't hesitate to pay, but geez, isn't Activation a bit extreme? I mean, for a product with nearly equivalent freeware versions and a web site with an abundance of "Coming soon" pages and functions, and the lack of even a phone number for activation support? But still you want people who buy your product to enter 66 digits to use it? The machine I installed CodeSmith on does not have a direct Internet connection, so I guess that's why I thought activation was more of a pain. To his (their's, whoever's) credit, I emailed a request for an activation number with my serial and machine number and received one within hours. Yeap, all 66 digits!
As for the product, who doesn't love CodeSmith who uses it? It does NOT work with VS2005 for those who were wondering--or maybe it does and I don't know how to add it. If I do, I'll be blogging on it, for sure. CS3.0 is slightly better integrated with VS2003 than 2.X was, but its still rough around the IDE edges and among other things, is way too hard to create and manage codebehind files. You can create a template.cst, but cannot create an accompanying codebehind file with it, for instance. To do so you have to cut-n-paste from a sample CS and manually add the src= and codebehind= properties in the .cst directive.
Still, congrats to Eric Smith on CS3.0 and THANK YOU for continuing to improve CodeSmith.