Today we released a new version of the T4 Editor.
You didn't heard about T4 templates or Text Transformations, before?, That's a technology made by P&P and was used by the DSL Tools team to able to run text transformations in its projects. Now the T4 template bits will be available for free as a part of the VS Orcas, so you would be run your own transformations in your projects for free. For example a common case is the artifacts generation from a database.
Some of the features of the new T4 Editor:
- Available for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 (Orcas B2)
- Colorization of directives, text blocks and code.
- Intellisense on directives and attribute values.
- Support for multiples host (GAX, DSLTools and a new Clarius one)
- Preview transformation and properties reflection.
See it in action here!.
You can read more about the features of the editor in my previous post and also in t4editor.net where you'll find useful screenshots and more videos.
Click here to Download the new T4Editor now!
Feel free to send me your feedback about what features should have next versions.
Enjoy!.
There are a well known issue with the UnfoldTemplateAction which is provided in the GAX Library. Basically this action able you to unfold .vstemplate files by hand but it has a ugly issue in where you can't do any parameter replacements than the default ones.
In fact is not a bug into the action so the issue resides in that is using the AddFromTemplate method from the DTE automation model and there's no way to pass any replacement dictionary using that method directly.
So I wrote an action in order to have a workaround, basically what it does is create a copy of the vstemplate and its elements, perform all the replacements, then unfold the template through the UnfoldTemplateAction.
You can download the source from here.
Hope that helps!