Consider the alternative used by frameworks like ASP.NET where markup files serve as source code and the actual code is generated at run time, invisible, unless you know where to look. While this approach results in a dramatic decrease in the visible source code of the solution, it is also the most difficult to understand. As much as people loved WinForms they seemed to hate WebForms for this complexity, which is why, perhaps, Microsoft created the MVC and Web Page frameworks to address the problem.

Boy, VS team has done everyone a disservice by training us to think like that. The whole invention of ’source control’ is to prevent that very thing. The TT file is the source, not the CS file that comes from it.

The template tool is equivalent to the old compiler that generated OBJ files. No one in their right mind would check in OBJ files if they had a professional and well-designed build and development tools set.

As a matter of fact, Microsoft ran “clean” builds of the entire windows operating system even before 1995. The never checked in OBJs, and to this day they still don’t. Why? Because the build tools are predictable, and the real source code is in source control.

Visual Studio simply blew it by ignoring their own in-house experts on software development, putting together this system that is some inferior model from the 80s.

Burried under GAC_MSIL I found Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplating.10.0.dll (without “Modeling”). For some reason this didn’t show up in my .NET references, nor was in present under the IDE’s PublicAssemblies directory.

Why? I don’t know, but I’m all good now!

- Harvo

I have added this project reference:
Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplating.Modeling.10.0.dll

And I have this using statement:
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplating;

And still the class is not found. Using Object Browser on that assembly shows TextTransformation is not in there (at least, it’s not public).

Note that I’m runing .NET 4.0.30319 RTMRel and VS 2010 10.0.30319.1 RTMRel.

What am I missing guys?

Thanks!

Harvo

I have written a class which inherits from TextTransformation. Is there anyway to get a T4 Template to use this as it’s base class

(I have tried using the inherits parameter, but it does not seem to work unless I use a “pre-processed template” - which is not what I want, as I want to actually generate an output, and not a class that I then run)

Do you have any idea how I go about doing this?

You can either change your template to be pre-processed or use the xsd.exe command-line tool.

oleg