T4 Editor - Cool Visual Studio Editor for T4 Templates Used in Software Factories
by David Hayden ( Tampa .NET Developer ), Filed: .NET Tools
Last night while presenting the Repository Factory at the Tampa .NET Developer Group, we discussed the ability to modify the T4 Templates used by the Repository Factory so that one can customize them based on their own coding standards and needs. Up until this morning I have been painstakingly modifying the T4 Templates within Visual Studio with no syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.
This morning I found the T4 Editor by Clarius Consulting that will allow you to get a better user experience while customizing and building your own T4 Templates. It is still in beta but has a version for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 that will work side-by-side. The features when it becomes RTM look to be pretty cool:
- Support for multiple T4 Hosts (DSL Tools, GAX and Clarius ones)
- Preview transformation of templates
- IntelliSense support for code blocks in C# and VB (ala VS ASP.Net editor)
- User preferences (via Tools->Option) for colors, indenting, etc.
- Properties Inspector support for entering template properties
- Visual Studio project and item templates
- Tooling support to generate artifacts from databases
- Samples for C# and VB.NET
I am just getting started with it this morning and have more questions than answers at the moment, but here is a snapshot of a T4 Template from the Repository Factory that we talked about last night with the T4 Editor installed in VS 2005:
The user experience is already a thousand times better.
They have some short videos that give you the full effect. Learn more here.
by David Hayden ( Tampa .NET Developer ), Filed: .NET Tools