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As given to the Dubuque .NET User Group, November 1st, 2011.
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Using Microsoft’s T4 Across the Life of an Application
Gary Pedretti
Logo, Design, and Company Information:© 2011 Centare Group, Ltd.Slide Show and Notes Content: Creative Commons License, Gary Pedretti
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
About Centare
Consulting Services OrganizationPrimary focus on Agile, Mobile and Cloud
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Gary Pedretti
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Over 12 years in the software industry – Database Administrator, Developer, Business Analyst, Application Architect
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MCPD 4.0 Web, MCTS 4.0 WCF/Web/Data Access, MCDBA MSSQL 2000, PSM, PSD .NET, PSD Java, CSM, MCPD 3.5 ASP.NET, MCTS 3.5 WCF/ASP.NET/ADO.NET, MCTS SharePoint 2003 Infrastructure, MCPD 2.0 Enterprise, MCTS 2.0 Distributed/Web/Windows, MCSD 1.1, MCAD 1.1, MOUS
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What is T4?T4 Basics and T4 Tooling
Using T4 Across the Life of an Application
What is T4?
Text Template Transformation Toolkit
A way to Template desired output
Provide input to the template
Process the template together with the input to produce text output
Text Transformation
XSLT – XML input, ? output (often XHTML)
Razor (and any number of MVC view engines like NVelocity, etc.) – ? input (often a Model object), (X)HTML output
T4 – ? input, ? output Anything goes
Designed for generic cases
Why?
Automate repetitive, boilerplate codeData Access code
Front-end scaffolding
Produce templated text output to be used by applications
Form letters
Transformations between different text formats
XML to C#
T4 Pre-History
CodeSmith was/is the primary mover in the .NET space
Around for a long time, very mature
Provides an excellent set of ready-to-use templates
Better template editing and debugging experience
Very code-centric (not geared around general text or transformations)
$$ licensing, not free
T4 Pre-History
Many competitors still exist, free and paid
XY Studio (web-based)
Atom Weaver (MDD-based)
Code Generator 360 (ASP.NET DAL-centric)
Iron Speed Designer (RAD front-to-back)
T4 History
Increasing importance and support as we’ve moved from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2010
Including out-of-band frameworks
T4 History
A second-class citizen in Visual Studio 2005
Available through the DSL tools download or through the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT – primarily used for software factories)
T4 History
More of a first-class citizen in VS 2008Built-in, but not available through File -> New
No highlighting or Intellisense
A lot of “dogfooding” started, especially with SP 1 – EF, MVC
T4 History
Almost a first-class citizen in VS 2010Still no highlighting or Intellisense
Dogfooding all over the place – EF (all code generation items), MVC 2, Architecture Tools)
Microsoft Dogfooding
ASP.NET MVC
ADO.NET Entity Framework
ASP.NET Dynamic Data
Lightswitch (cannot currently get at the templates used, though)
VS 2010 Architecture Tool Modeling Feature Pack (forward-engineering)
Microsoft Dogfooding – ASP.NET MVC
Add Controller and Add View
Templates found at [Visual Studio Install Directory]\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\[CSharp | VisualBasic]\Web\MVC 2\CodeTemplates\
Microsoft Dogfooding – ASP.NET MVC
Microsoft Dogfooding – Entity Framework
Default, EF-aware EntitiesAdd the EntityObject Generator as a code generation item to see what the default template does behind the scenes
POCO and Self-Tracking Entities Implemented through templates
Add code generation item to see the templates in your project
Microsoft Dogfooding – Entity Framework
Microsoft Dogfooding – Architecture Tools
Modeling Feature Pack (built in to VS 2010 Feature Pack 2) allows for forward-generation of code from diagrams
Templates found at [Visual Studio Install Directory]\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack\2.0\Templates\Text\
Microsoft Dogfooding – Architecture Tools
Microsoft Dogfooding – Demo
T4 Basics and T4 ToolingUsing T4 Across the Life of an Application
What is T4?
T4 Text Transformation
Standard Templates
Design-time templates
Meant to be run within the context of Visual Studio
Precompiled TemplatesRuntime templates
For text to be used by an applicationForm letters
For CodeDOM-like activities – dynamic compilation of code
Note T4 would be language-specific where raw CodeDOM would not
Also makes for easily composable and reusable blocks
Just call the TransformText method, it returns a string
T4 Syntax - Directives
Template <#@ template #>Language
Debug
Inherits
Hostspecific
Output <#@ output #>Extension
Import <#@ import #>Namespace
Resolves to “using” in C# generation
T4 Syntax - Directives
Assembly <#@ assembly #>Name
Equivalent of Add Reference…
Careful if you need to rebuild – locks the assembly because of the way the T4 engine handles AppDomains
T4 Toolbox has a VolatileAssembly custom directive
Fixed in VS 2010 SP1 via shadowing
You can use MSBuild-style references$(SolutionDir)
$(OutDir)
T4 Syntax - Directives
Include <#@ include #>File
As if file contents were dropped directly into the template
Parameter <#@ parameter #>Name
Type
T4 Syntax – Text Blocks
Standard block of text with no delimiters – will be placed in the output file wholesale
T4 Syntax – Control Blocks
Statement or Standard Block<# #>
For standard code not contained in a class
T4 Syntax – Control Blocks
Expression Block<#= #>
For any expression, evaluates and converts to string
T4 Syntax – Control Blocks
Class Block<#+ #>
For placing helper classes (or any other code not included in the main transform) inline in the template
Must be the last block in a templateUnless you’re including a file with a Class Block using the Include Directive
This is noted because it should be common…
T4 Syntax – Utility Methods
Write and WriteLineEssentially the same as an Expression block
Allows for text output inside Standard blocks
May be preferable over Expression blocks for readability, if a Standard block is long or contains nesting
Formatting overloads that take string params at the end
T4 Syntax – Utility Methods
Indent Methods and PropertiesCurrentIndent property returns the current indent level
PushIndent indents
PopIndent moves back one indention
ClearIndent clears all indents
Error and Warning MethodsTo write to the VS Error list
Error(“some expression”)
T4 Syntax – Utility Methods
Host PropertyIf hostspecific is set to “true” in the template directive
Provides some helpful methodsResolvePath
Hooks into the VS API, if VS is the hostCast this.Host as an IServiceProvider
Then GetService of the DTE type
T4 Syntax – Utility Methods
Host Property Example to access VS API:<#@ template hostspecific="true" language="C#" #> <#@ output extension=".txt" #> <#@ assembly name="EnvDTE" #> <#@ import namespace="EnvDTE" #> <# IServiceProvider serviceProvider = (IServiceProvider)this.Host; DTE dte = serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(DTE)) as DTE; #>
Number of projects in this solution: <#= dte.Solution.Projects.Count #>
T4 Syntax – Escape Sequences
Use the \ for escaping any special characters
\<# ... \#>
T4 Tooling
Use an editor!
Good “freemium” editors out there in the Visual Studio Gallery
Tangible T4 EditorNo need to install the Tangible architecture tools
Latest version has a fix for use with ReSharper
DevArt T4 Editor
Clarius Visual T4
T4 Tooling
Tangible T4 Editor Extras – Template GalleryMany excellent examples
Many snippets that would typically be used for Includes
Multi-file output
VS automation
Many out-of-the-box solutionsHTML image gallery
T4 Tooling
Still no editor support – syntax highlighting/Intellisense – in VS 11
Will this change? No indications…
Using T4 Across the Life of an Application
What is T4?
T4 Basics and T4 Tooling
Code Generation Issues are Universal
UI Designers in VS
You’ve seen this a lot://---------------// <auto-generated>// This code was generated by a tool.// Changes to this file will be lost if the code is regenerated.// </auto-generated>//---------------
Code Generation Issues are Universal
Extending the codeInheritance
Partial classes!!!
Composition
Resources
Oleg Sych’s Blog: http://www.olegsych.com/
T4 Team/Gareth JonesOld: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/garethj/
New: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/t4/
Kathleen Dollard: http://msmvps.com/blogs/kathleen/
MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx
Resources
Tangible’s tutorials: http://t4-editor.tangible-engineering.com/How-Do-I-With-T4-Editor-Text-Templates.htm
Wikipedia code generation tool comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_code_generation_tools
