Editing Text Template (T4) files: the Visual Studio/Notepad vs. SFT experience
If you have ever worked with GAX/GAT and/or the DSL Tools
chances are that you had to look at existing templates and maybe customize them
or create your own. Currently none of these two technologies offers you any
remedies for the pain that is browsing and editing these templates with a
“plain-text” experience.
So, let’s say you want to understand the serialization code
in order to being able to introduce a few customizations of your own here and
there. Try editing C:\Program
Files\Visual Studio 2005
SDK\2006.09\VisualStudioIntegration\Tools\DSLTools\TextTemplates\Dsl\DomainClassSerializer.tt
with Visual Studio (or notepad for that matter, as you’re not going to tell the
difference in this case), it’s “only” 3751 lines of NO syntax coloring, NO code
completion, NO quick navigation, NO nothing.
Let’s take another large file, Diagram.tt (living in the same folder as the file pointed out
above). What changes in this case? It’s “only” 2469 lines in length, much
shorter than the previous file, and we still get the NO nothing.
Ok, these are large files, not every text template file will
be that large, granted. But can you still live with the “NO nothing” experience even for smaller files? I don’t think so, I
know I can’t.
This is the reason why we have introduced a Text Template
editor into SFT,
for helping you today with
your daily tasks in developing Software Factory projects.
Here is a single screenshot that should tease you enough to go download the bits:
You can also take a look at the T4 Editor’s Quick Users Guide (lots of screenshots in there) and if you
want to learn more about this feature you can check Jose’s blog who works on
the SFT team.