Can you process T4 templates from inside a .NET application?

Question

Can you process T4 templates from inside a .NET application? Is that code available to be called? included in a project? licensing?

update: so it does look like you would have to use VS in some way.

Answer 1

See Creating Custom Text Template Hosts.

Answer 2

As I understand it, T4 is a part of visual studio and cannot be redistributed without it. At the minimum, you will need to redistribute VS shell with your application.

Answer 3

T4 is unfortunately tied to Visual Studio at the moment. I believe Clarius are working on a CodeGen version of their tools which may support automation, but they haven't finalised a feature set yet, plus it's going to be a commercial product. (More info: http://www.visualt4.com/features.html.) Until then, you'll have to either use classic codegen techniques (effectively writing your own T4), or go down the Visual Studio Shell + SDK route which Oleg mentions (more info: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsx2008/products/bb933751.aspx).

If you don't have to use the T4 syntax, then the CodeSmith product may do what you require. It includes an API for writing templates and generating code from them. It's a well-respected commercial product, but I haven't used it myself. There's an online help guide, and the API reference is here: http://www.codesmithtools.com/help/Default.aspx##CodeSmith.chm/Using_the_CodeSmith_API.html.

I hope this helps. Best of luck!

Answer 4

I wrote a cleanly reverse-engineered implementation of a T4 engine for the MonoDevelop IDE. It's open-source, licensed under the permissive MIT/X11 license, so you are free to embed the engine in your app or redistribute it. There's also an implementation of the TextTransform.exe command-line tool, and some APIs in the Mono.TextTemplating namespace to aid in hosting the engine.

The only real missing feature right now is custom directive processors - but patches for this are welcome :-)

You can get the code from monodevelop/main/src/addins/TextTemplating in Mono SVN.

Answer 5

Hi tyndall

For processing T4 templates you have to use Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplating.dll but I don't think that you could redistribute this assembly

Regards Muse VSExtensions