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Customizing generated code in ASP.NET MVC

Just in case you missed the news, the ASP.NET MVC team is using T4 to generate code (yeah!)
The way they have integrated T4 in their own product is not what we would have expected (they wrote their own T4 host) so we took our Visual T4 Editor and Visual T4 Code Generator bits and added them knowledge about this custom host in order to offer the best possible tooling experience.

You can now see properties of their templates appearing in the Properties window, easily set them and preview how the generation will look like with a single click.

Adrian has recorded a quick video of how this is looking like already, watch it here.

We added this support last week so it is not there yet on the public bits, but I promess it will be there soon!

New Blog About Code Generation With T4 in Visual Studio!

While developing the Visual T4 Code Generator edition my team and I are constantly having discussions on how the best code generation tool in earth should look like and also about more “abstract” code generation chores not necessarily related to the product we’re developing.

So it occurred to me (yes, I’m that clever…) that we should take our internal document drafts from our internal wiki and put all this stuff into a blog (of course we will remove the bad language first) to make our plans more public and gather community feedback while we’re at it.

In this new blog you will find posts by Adrian, Joaquin, Jose and me (and if I get lucky I may get other Clarius people to blog too)

Please subscribe and let us know what do you think, thanks!

Sneak Peek at New Code Generation Tool in Visual Studio

I’m very excited to announce we’ve just made available for testing the alpha bits of our Visual T4 Code Generator edition to existing customers of our Visual T4 Editor Professional edition.

We’ve been working hard during the past several months on extending the current codebase of our editor to incorporate lots of new features aimed at code generation so we could offer a very complete tool to compete in the market for code generators.

In case you are wondering what the heck T4 technology is please read this nice introduction by Scott Hanselman.

Let me give you a quick 1-2-3 on what our Visual T4 Code Generator is based on and some of the features we believe will make it a great (the best) code generation tool.

We have built this on top of Microsoft’s T4 transformation technology, meaning:

- The core transformation technology we use is developed, maintained and supported by Microsoft for the next foreseeable future.

- T4 is gaining adoption by different Microsoft teams (Entity Framework team, ASP.NET team, etc) and their new products will use T4, meaning you will only have to learn one code generation technology and you will feel “at home” when using Visual T4 products to work with both, the code templates from these teams and your own templates.

We can also proudly say that we’re fully integrated within Visual Studio, and we really mean integrated here, REALLY (not a definitive list but just a few that I’ve on top of my head now):

- Use of a single IDE (Visual Studio) no switching back and forth between Visual Studio and a boring custom IDE.

- No custom-buggy-parser for a custom-buggy IntelliSense experience; we offer you the same VS experience you are used to when writing C# code.

- Use a friendly DB-metadata browsing APIs to easily generate code from databases.

- Drag and drop a database or table from Server Explorer or a XSD/XML file from Solution Explorer and start writing code against it.

- Generate multiple output files from a single template, and easily add them to a solution or project by using our simple VS integration APIs.

- Play nicely with MS Build

- Use the Properties window to set the values for your template with a few clicks.

How does the Visual T4 Code Generator edition differentiate in features from the Visual T4 Editor Professional edition? Please read here to find out. Note the feature list is not final (we’re at alpha).

We’ve also posted a few videos featuring some of the features found in the alpha, if you’re curious enough, please find them here.

If you have any questions, feedback, etc, please let me know, we really value all feedback and we do take the time to respond.

Thanks!