Oleg Sych

This article reviews the theory and practice behind ADO.NET Entity Framework, discusses limitations of the current tools it provides and compares the benefits offered by solving the object-relational impedance mismatch against their costs. The article suggest using Entity Framework to improve and reduce costs of data-driven application design, which is prevalent in todays information systems and describes a code generation solution built using T4 Toolbox that can be used to achieve this goal.

This article discusses new features of T4 Toolbox that allow you trigger code generation automatically when the input or model file changes and while still giving developers the ability to customize the code generation using rich template-based functionality of T4.

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

This article provides an overview of preprocessed text templates in Visual Studio 2010 and includes detailed description of differences between preprocessed and traditional text templates.

This article discusses advantages and drawbacks of T4 and CodeDOM and shows how to combine these code generation technologies to get the best of both worlds and allow tool developers to build code generators that can produce code in multiple .NET languages and allow application developers to extend them using templating features of T4 and the programming language of their choice.

This article describes how to use model-first approach to develop database applications using LINQ to SQL and version 9.5 of T4 Toolbox.

This post is a part of the series that introduces code generation with Text Templates (also known as T4 Templates) in Visual Studio using C# and Visual Basic; explains how to create reusable templates and combine them in complex code generators.

This article describes a new, ready-to-use code generator included in T4 Toolbox, which produces LINQ to SQL DataContext and entity classes.

Build 8.12.27.1 of T4 Toolbox includes a new project item template for an AzMan authorization policy XML file and a code generator that produces a C# wrapper for performing operation-based authorization checks against it. The generator creates a separate enumerated type with security operations for each application application in the AzMan policy and a wrapper class with strongly-typed Authorize and CanPerform methods that take these enums as parameters.

T4 Toolbox provides a micro-framework for composite code generators, automatic management of multiple output files in the solution, unit test runner, custom directive processors, ready-to-use code generators and Visual Studio project item templates.