Articles

  • Text Template Transformation Toolkit

    Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) is a template-based code generation engine available with Visual Studio 2008 and 2005. This article provides an overview of T4 and includes links to in-depth articles and ready-to-use examples.

  • T4 Architecture

    This article provides an in-depth look at the architecture of T4 template transformation process, discusses some constraints that limit template design, describes techniques that can be used to work around these limitations and points out some (sometimes undocumented) mechanisms for making your T4 templates more powerful.

  • T4 Template Design

    This article discusses design challenges developers face as complexity of their T4 templates increases; defines qualities of a reusable T4 templates; discusses techniques that can be used to achieve these qualities and compares their pros and cons.

  • Code Generation with Visual Studio Templates

    This article provides an overview of Visual Studio Templates, demonstrates how to create a project item template for a T4 file and includes a ready-to-use T4 item template.

  • Simplifying WCF: Using Exceptions as Faults

    This article describes an overview of error handling in WCF, discusses its advantages and drawbacks and shows how to extend WCF to marshal .NET exceptions as SOAP faults. Ready-to-use source code and examples are available for download.