nVelocity to render templates

nVelocity is a .Net-based template engine. It permits anyone to use the simple yet powerful template language to reference objects defined in .Net code. I use this template engine for rendering the mail templates in my application. This is a wonderful framework, with a defined syntax to render field values inside the template. For those who do not know, project is a port of the Jakarta Velocity to Microsoft .Net (written in C#). This is a discontinued project, but the Castle project fork  enhanced it to support their monorail implementation. There are different versions available, I used one from Castle project website which has a lot of bug fixes and features incorporated than the original.

Below is the sample code to illustrate nVelocity to render mail template.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using Commons.Collections;
using NVelocity;
using NVelocity.App;
using System.Collections;

namespace NVelocitySample
{
  class Program
  {
    static VelocityEngine velocity;
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      InitializeVelocity();
 
      string output = GenerateOutput();
      Console.WriteLine(output);
    }

    private static void InitializeVelocity()
    {
      ExtendedProperties properties = new ExtendedProperties();

      velocity = new VelocityEngine(properties);
    }


    private static string GenerateOutput()
    {
        Message mail = new Message();


        mail.From = "sender@company.com";
        mail.To = "recipient@company.com";
        mail.Subject = "This a mail render example";
        mail.Body = "This is the body where replace a dictionary to show the versatility of nVelocity";
       

        Dictionary<string, string> coll = new Dictionary<string, string>();
        coll["key"] = "Hi,";



        string stringData = "From: $mail.From  \n";
        stringData += "To:   $mail.To \n\n";
        stringData += "Subject: $mail.Subject  \n\n";
        stringData += "$coll.get_Item('key') $mail.Body";


        Hashtable hashTable = new Hashtable();
        hashTable.Add("mail", mail);
        hashTable.Add("coll", coll);

        VelocityContext context = new VelocityContext(hashTable);

        StringWriter generated = new StringWriter();
        StringReader reader = new StringReader(stringData);
        velocity.Evaluate(context, generated, "nVelocityLog", reader);
        return generated.GetStringBuilder().ToString();


    }


   class Message
    {
        private string from;
        private string to;
        private string subject;
        private string body;

        public string From
        {
            get { return from; }
            set { from = value; }
        }

        public string To
        {
            get { return to; }
            set { to = value; }
        }

        public string Subject
        {
            get { return subject; }
            set { subject = value; }
        }

        public string Body
        {
            get { return body; }
            set { body = value; }
        }
    }

    class Coll
    {
        Dictionary<string, string> fields = new Dictionary<string, string>();

        public Dictionary<string, string> Fields
        {
            get { return fields; }
            set { fields = value; }
        }
    }
  }
}