Jose Escrich
Extensibility Thoughts
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Visual Studio T4 Editor is finally out!.
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:
A0
- 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. -
Dealing with the UnfoldTemplateAction and parameter replacement.
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.
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Use a simple Form instead of the GAX Wizard
A recipe execution implies three parts which are, the arguments, the data gathering and the actions that will be executed using those arguments. By default the data gathering service in GAX was implemented over the Vs Wizard Framework due to a wizard is a very common scenery to gather values.
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Registering a GAX Guidance Package in the Experimental Vs Hive
One of the features in the latest July 2007 CTP version of GAX/GAT is the possibility to include switches in the installer execution at design time (that's the switches that will be added in the installutil execution when you register a GP through the Register GAT action, as show in the following picture).
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Customizing GAX Wizard Pages (part 1)
There are some parts that you could want to customize in the wizard page, unfortunately most of this part are not exposed. GAX wizard was implemented over the Visual Studio Wizard Framework and each page inherit from its WizardPage base class and the only thing that you can change is the logo through the Logo property and regarding the title you just can change the text, but no any other property.
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New T4 Template Visual Studio Editor.
During this past month I've been working in a new T4 template editor as a part of the SFT.
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Recipe Designer and SFT June CTP
Today we shipped the June CTP of the Clarius Software Factories Toolkit, which includes a new version of the Recipe Designer. The main change what I've been working on, is the serialization behavior in order to support round tripping, beside that was an interesting opportunity to work implementing a custom serialization in a Dsl.
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ClariuS Software Factories Toolkit June CTP is out!.
The Software Factories Toolkit June CTP is finally out and the key improvements in this release are:
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Testing T4 templates using the GAX host
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Clarius Software Factory Toolkit February 2007 CTP is out.
Finally the new February CTP of the ClariuS Software Factory Toolkit is out and you can download now, from here.