ASP.NET 4.0 Hosting :: Generating Code Using Visual Studio 2008 and 2010

ASP.NET 4.0 Hosting :: Generating Code Using Visual Studio 2008 and 2010

Microsoft included its T4 generation language in the box in Visual Studio 2008 and added important new features in Visual Studio 2010. Visual Studio 2010 makes generation easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates. Code generation lets you automatically create significant portions of your application. It has the potential to decrease bugs and increase your ability to alter code across your application as needs change. Microsoft's generation language is T4 and it is included in the box starting with Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2010 makes T4 easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates. I'll show you how to use T4 in Studio 2005 and beyond.

Microsoft's code-generation tool emerged from the DSL Toolkit. DSL stands for Domain Specific Language and code generation transforms information written in a DSL into a .NET language, which creates the run-time artifact for representing the DSL. While I won't cover DSL in this article, aspects of T4 are easier to understand in connection with this perspective. When you have time to explore it, the DSL Toolkit provides a nice visual DSL, particularly in Visual Studio 2010. Oslo will provide a textual DSL. This article discusses using the T4 generation language outside DSL to generate portions of your applications.

We'll show the generation language itself, and then return to cover a few approaches to executing templates and which portions of your applications are most likely to benefit from generation.

Starting Out with T4

T4 stands for Text Templating Transformation Toolkit. If you're running Visual Studio 2005, you'll need to download and install the DSL Toolkit to have T4 available. If you're running Visual Studio 2008, T4 is already on your box, although it's well hidden. Visual Studio 2010 includes T4 in the Add Item dialog. The T4 language is very similar in all of these versions of Visual Studio. T4 is part of Visual Studio, not the .NET Framework because it's a design-time tool.

Generation is a transformation process. You take some sort of template and some sort of input data and create a new file as output. The input data is called metadata. The output file can be anything-including documentation, configuration, and code files such as C#, Visual Basic .NET, or T-SQL. You can create one or many files depending on the capabilities of your tool. With the default Visual Studio behavior, T4 has limited metadata capabilities and outputs only one file per template.

To create a T4 template in Visual Studio 2005 (after you've installed the DSL Toolkit) or 2008, create a text file and save it with a .tt extension in a Visual Basic .NET or a C# project. If you're working in Visual Studio 2010, select Text Template in the Add Item dialog. Visual Studio provides a default custom tool based on the file extension.

To create your first template, type the following into the editor window:

//Hello World

When you save, you'll find a dependent file created with a .cs extension. The dependent file appears as a child node to your template file. If you can't see the dependent file after saving, select "Show All Files" at the top of Solution Explorer. You can also right-click and explicitly run the custom tool. The dependent file created from the template above contains the single Hello World comment.

If you're using Visual Basic .NET, you'll need to specify the output extension, change the comment character, and then select "Show All Files" in Solution Explorer to find the dependent file:

'Hello World

All current versions of Visual Studio offer only a "Notepad" editing experience for T4-no code coloration and no IntelliSense. In Visual Studio 2010, you can download the Tangible T4 Editor from Tangible Engineering. In earlier versions, you can download the Visual T4 Editor (professional or community edition) from Clarius Consulting. Thanks to both companies for offering free versions to get you started.

All code-generation templates interleave code that represents the logic of the template with the output code. Good editor support is essential to distinguish these two types of code, especially in the common case where both languages are the same.

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