Oleg Sych

I’ve had a difficult time trying to start a series of posts explaining design of T4 Toolbox. For instance, it includes a class called Template. When I sat down to write about it, the question I asked myself and tried to answer was “What is a Template?” Well, it’s a template. I’ve been thinking about it so long that it became self explanatory and I couldn’t describe it effectively. After spending a couple of hours on failed drafts, I realized this approach was not working.

At the same time, I also had a thought in my mind that my blog doesn’t offer much help to people who are only getting started with T4 and code generation. I cover this information in my talks, but most of my readers are located outside of Florida and don’t have the opportunity to hear them.

Finally, some of the articles I wrote early on are becoming outdated and many of them are more complicated than necessary. OK, some of them are a lot more complicated than a template developer needs..

To address these issues, I am starting a short series of posts about code generation with text templates in Visual Studio. This series will cover a range of topics, starting with basics and ending with advanced topics, such as design of templates and code generators. It will be based on T4 Toolbox to take advantage of the framework it provides for generating multiple output files and integration with Visual Studio. As this series is targeted at a template developer, it will not cover the finer points of T4 Architecture.  It will cover some of the topics discussed by the T4 Template Design mini-series. However, instead of describing all of the various ways you could design your templates, it will focus on the approach I believe to be the best and have chosen for T4 Toolbox.

I hope you find this series useful. As always, I would like to hear from you.  Please post a comment or send me an email if you find this information useful, if you have a specific question or suggestion. A simple attaboy is always appreciated.