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An introduction to T4 templates
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T4
Overture• Level 01-01-02• Interactive
• On the Menu– What it is?– Demo– Alternatives– Learning’s
T4 is NOT and of these
You may feel like Skynet was built with T4 sometimes
TLA• What does T4 stand for?• Text Template Transformation Toolkit
Three Two Letter Acronym
Why do we need it?• Cause developers are expensive and Xbox games
are fun
History
2005 Shipped out of band platform
2008 Shipped platform with Visual Studio
2010MAJOR enhancements to platformSomething is missing here…
A word of warning…• Out of the box tooling DOES NOT EXIST– It’s notepad + command line basically
• 3rd parties can make the pain go away– I use the free stuff from Tangible & T4 Toolbox– You will too, accept that and move on
Is this thing used?• ASP.MVC uses T4 templates for views and controllers• DSL tools in VS 2010 use it– BizTalk– Architecture Tools
• 3rd Party uses like LINQ to SQL replacement
High Level Plan
Template Code OutputT4 toolkit .NET Framework
C#
VBHTML
XAMLCSV
DEMOSLIKE THE MOON LANDING DEMOS TAKE LOTS OF PREPARATION, LEARNING NEW SKILLS AND MOSTLY FAKING IT
What haven’t you seen?
• Build integration• Pre-processed Templates
Alternatives• CodeDOM– Part of .NET– Used internally by T4– More powerful– Harder to learn– Ideally for language scenarios
Alternatives• CodeSmith– Third Party– $$$– More rugged tooling, debugging features
Alternatives• NVelocity– Port of Java’s Jakata Velocity– Free– Wildly different syntax
Alternatives• Hire a monkey
• Maybe this is why you were hired…
Help?
Learning's• Search for T4 AND Visual Studio Text Template • Use the Tangible T4 editor• Use the T4 Toolkit• Make use of scratch applications in prototyping• For use within Visual Studio
QUESTIONS
[email protected]@rmaclean