Uncategorized Archive

Presentation: Code Generation with T4


Back in October, I presented a session on Code Generation with T4 at the Developer Tools Ecosystem Summit. This session provides an overview of developing code generators with T4, starting with template syntax and transformation process, to template debugging, to integration and deployment. During this session you see a sample code generator built from scratch, […]

T4 Toolbox: Support for Visual Studio 2010


As of version 9.10, T4 Toolbox now supports Visual Studio 2010 in addition to Visual Studio 2008.

MVP Award


I am truly honored to receive the Most Valued Professional (MVP) award from Microsoft. It is both humbling and immensely satisfying to be recognized by this great company. I find it remarkable that a company of this size is so passionate and consistent about supporting its user community and partners.
Of course the company can […]

Getting and compiling T4 Toolbox source code


This post provides detailed instructions on how to get source code of T4 Toolbox and compile it on your computer.

T4Toolbox build 9.3.21.1 problem


There is a serious problem in version 9.3.21.1 of the T4 Toolbox. In this version installer was modified to deploy T4Toolbox.dll assembly in the GAC, but unexpectedly it stopped installing it into the regular location - $(ProgramFiles)\T4 Toolbox\bin. It turned out to be an expected behavior of Microsoft Installer, as Aaron Stebner describes here. Following […]

Advanced Code Generation Patterns with T4 & DSL Tools


Back in September, I had a chance to co-present Advanced code generation patterns with T4 & DSL Tools with Gareth Jones and Jean-Marc Prieur at the VSX Developer Conference. Here is the abstract of this session:
Code generation is an increasingly common technique in application development and forms a part of many Visual Studio extensions. With […]

Killing three birds with one stone


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 […]

T4 Toolbox


You may have noticed that in my last couple of articles about T4, the download links point to a CodePlex project called T4 Toolbox. This post describes what this project is about.

Recent blog posts about T4


July blogs posts about code generation with T4 text templates.

T4: Extending the Generated Template Class by Mike Pagel


Mike Pagel recently posted an interesting article about T4 on CodeProject called “T4: Extending the Generated Template Class“. In this article, Mike describes several approaches for implementing code generation logic - helper methods defined in class feature blocks, custom directive processors and a custom TextTransformation base class referenced using the inherits attribute of the template […]