How to transform T4 templates on build without installing a Visual Studio SDK
The MS recommended way is to just use the Microsoft.TextTemplating.targets which come with the Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK. It makes me slightly nervous that it requires a little known SDK that is hosted on http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vsvmsdk rather than something more “official” like the MSDN Download Center, where the proper VS SDK lives. It also turns out to be absolutely unnecessary, since all you need is already installed with your base Visual Studio setup.
Visual Studio installs the TextTransform.exe utility, which can use used to transform a template automatically. Ideally, you shouldn’t have to do anything different than you do today when using text templates, and the automatic build-time transform should “just happen”. One way to achieve this is by grabbing all the files that have one of the T4 custom tools assigned (they are always assigned them when you create a new text template in VS):...