How to use T4 to generate CRUD stored procedures.How to use T4 to generate Decorator classes.Here's some of the links from Oleg's blog. Reusing code generators on multiple projects.Creating reusable code generation templates.You can use it in your projects, as above, or you can call T4 from the command-line.Īside from Kzu and the folks at Clarius, Rob notes that Oleg Sych has a great collection of T4 resources. T4 can generate any kind of text file, not just code. tt file, you'll see it's using a CustomTool listed as the 'TextTemplatingFileGenerator.' This custom tool extensibility point is how things like XSD and WSDL code generators hook in to generate their artifacts. designer files you've seen elsewhere in Visual Studio. This is the same visual metaphor used to the express the template/generated file relationship with. That's the file that will hold the result of the generation. Click OK if you are cool with potential evil. You'll get a warning since it's a generator, that someone could generate evil. Now, go into Visual Studio and make a Console App (or any app) and add a Text File, but name it something with a. They have a pay version that gets you more if you want. You don't need this, but if you want really get the most out of T4, first, head over to Clarius Consulting and get their ' T4 Editor Community Edition.' That'll get you some basic coloring. However, it's not deep-deep built in, because there's no item templates in File | New Item and there's no intellisense or syntax highlighting.

If you're doing something twice or more, manually, in your company, generate it. Now's the time to introduce code generation to your company. To be clear, you HAVE THIS NOW on your system…go play. What's the story? Well, T4 is a code generator built right into Visual Studio. Hopefully I can add something small to the conversation. He and I were singing its praises last night. Blogging about T4 (the Text Template Transformation Toolkit) had been on my list literally for a year.

Visual studio code generation tool