The control logic is written as fragments of program code in Visual C# or Visual Basic. See my other T4 tutorials to see the regular T4 text files in the header image. The most useful application for a text template is to generate material based on the content of a source such as a model, database, or data file. To get this to work we relied on a custom .targets file being installed. Features. interfaceWriter is a action that writes out the definition of the interface itself. In most cases this is not important, but you might discover restrictions in certain complex cases. tangible T4 Editor features include Syntax Highlighting, Statement Completion, Error Reporting, a Template Gallery as well as Debugging features and UML-Style modeling tools. For example, the following control block and text block cause the output file to contain the line "0, 1, 2, 3, 4 Hello! VS2019 extension that increases productivity when working with T4 templates, especially in combination with T4Executer. For example, this block prints lines with numbers: A class feature control block defines properties, methods, or any other code that should not be included in the main transform. The default language is C#, but to use Visual Basic, you can write this directive at the beginning of the file: The language in which you write the code in the control blocks is unrelated to the language of the text that is generated. four times: You can insert a text block wherever a Write(); statement would be allowed in the code. |  Imprint. Key Features * Intellisense For more information about control blocks, see Text Template Control Blocks. Control blocks - program code that inserts variable values into the text, and controls conditional or repeated parts of the text. You can now accelerate your projects by adopting Microsoft T4 today and generate the code you need directly from diagrams, database schemas, xml files or other sources - Write less, achieve more. Overview Q & A Rating & Review. A more powerful method is to read the data as a model, which your text template code can navigate. T4 stands for Text Template Transformation Toolkit, which is Microsoft's template-based text-generation framework. You can mix any number of text blocks and standard control blocks in a template file. The included content is processed almost as if it were part of the including text template. A collection of templates can transform such a source into multiple files. This is inserted into the output file. Generally these templates can be a little clunky to write, but once you get the right they can be a real time saver. For example: It is particularly useful to place a method that generates text in a separate file that can be included by more than one template. Design-Time Code Generation by using T4 Text Templates, Generating Code from a Domain-Specific Language, Accessing Visual Studio or other Hosts from a Template, Generating Files with the TextTransform Utility. On the Tools menu, click Extension Manager. See also In Visual Studio, a T4 text template is a mixture of text blocks and control logic that can generate a text file. In addition, you can reference other .NET assemblies or your own assemblies. It allows you to refer to types in your code without using a fully qualified name: You can use as many assembly and import directives as you want. Devart T4 Editor is a Visual Studio add-in for editing T4 templates with syntax highlighting, intellisense and code outlining. The Microsoft T4 Generation Engine is already built into Visual Studio, however Visual Studio does not provide an Code-Editor for it. namespaceName is also provided by T4 – the namespace the interface and classes will belong to. interfaceName is the name of the interface. tangible T4 Editor comes with UML-Style modeling tools and can generate from diagrams, database schemas, xml, word, excel sources, or any other data source. T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) is a great tool to generate code at design time; you can, for instance, create POCO classes from database tables, generate repetitive code, etc. Devart T4 Editor for Visual Studio 2012 is a powerful Visual Studio add-in for editing T4 templates with syntax highlighting, intellisense, code outlining, and all the features of a quality text editor add-in. Generate files in a Visual Studio solution. For more information, see Generating Code from a Domain-Specific Language. T4Editor. The expression can include any variable that is in scope. Text template directives provide general instructions to the text templating engine about how to generate the transformation code and the output file. T4 Templates T4 stands for “Text Template Transformation Toolkit” and is a text generation framework that comes with Visual Studio. Click Online Gallery, and then use the search tool. Text blocks - content that is copied directly to the output. (This isn't true of a run-time text template, which provides code that is compiled along with the rest of your code.). T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) is a great tool to generate code at design time; you can, for instance, create POCO classes from database tables, generate repetitive code, etc. You must also set hostspecific="true" in the template directive: You can also obtain other services that are provided by the host. They include methods for helping you indent the output, and for reporting errors. It does colorization of template code versus output text, keyword colorization, and some intellisense. In Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 and later, you can use C# version 6.0 features in T4 templates directives. So syntax errors in your C# code (such as forgetting to assign (or define) the UsePropertyChanged variable above) will cause the template generation to fail, and any related output files to be only partially generated, if at all. 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