Followers of the IHttpHandler : T4

Working with T4 templates?

vga — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:30:00 GMT

A Cyber Monday Sale deal from Clarius:

If you're writing T4 templates for Software Factories, DSLs, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework or just doing any other code gen and you're still not running Clarius Visual T4 Editor Pro edition this is your chance to get it at HUGE 70% off, for only $29.99! (Valid only through 11/30)

Enjoy!

Customizing generated code in ASP.NET MVC

vga — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:06:15 GMT

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!

vga — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:39:42 GMT

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

vga — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:59:15 GMT

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!

Entity Framework to adopt T4 for code generation in v2

vga — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:49:34 GMT

Yesterday the Entity Framework team announced at PDC08 that they will based all their code generation on the Microsoft built-in T4 technology. This is great news as it will allow deeply customization of the generated code.

If you're new to T4 you should read Scott Hanselman's post on T4 as your starting point on what resources are out there.

And of course, if you're authoring T4 templates, you can't miss the Clarius T4 Editor!.

T4 Editor v1.0 RTM finally available!

vga — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:39:39 GMT

After lots and lots of hard work I'm very proud to announce that my team shipped v1.0 of the Clarius T4 Editor today.

We've been insanely struggling to get the bits finished during the last few months; you know, extending Visual Studio for simple stuff is far from trivial let alone extending it in some crazy ways like reusing the existing C# infrastructure. Nothing but lots of "fun"...

I've received lots of pings from people asking how the editor will be available, so this is the story:

We're offering a Community edition, featuring basic T4 IntelliSense and syntax coloring, for free as in beer. And we're offering a paid Professional edition too, including a few more extra features plus our King feature which is support for embedded C# code blocks. If you're interested into finding how these two editions compare you can find a summary here.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I'm trying to save some typing by using this picture:

Now imagine how much your productivity will improve and what are you going to do with all the time you will save thanks to using the T4 Editor. :)

T4 Editor beta released!

vga — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:19:57 GMT

After a few weeks of lots of hard work we were finally able to release a pretty stable release of our T4 Editor out to the community at http://www.t4editor.net.

It currently support VS 2005 and VS 2008 beta 2 and has most (but not all yet) of the bells and whistles you would expect from a nice and integrated editor in Visual Studio (meaning IntelliSense, syntax coloring, region collapsing, etc).

If you're into anything like DSL, GAX or Software Factories then this is a must have for you.

And if you're using any of the code generation tools out there and you've haven't heard of T4 yet, then it's probably time you give it a look...

You can go directly to the download page and give it a try, I would love to hear your feedback if you do so!