Visual studio 2012 run all t4 templates

I would like to be able to switch this back-and-forth from "manual transform mode" and "auto transform mode", but it appears the Visual Studio is not that smart yet -- unless someone has a workaround. The content you requested has been removed. Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads.

Remove From My Forums. Answered by:. Archived Forums. NET development. Binary Worrier. Autogenerating certain types of classes using T4 saves us a lot of time, but developing and maintaining the T4 can be a bit of a pain point sometimes - this will make those things easier.

This is great news! T4 templating is a powerful tool I've used in many projects but it can be very hard to set up and understand why it doesn't work. Hopefully it's going to be much easier with a debugger!

T4 templates are an amazing feature. We use them to create multiple artifacts for our products and we also use them within our custom code generation framework, replacing our own templating system. The speed at which we can generate code with them is astounding! They are a superb way to generate domain specific code either with, or without, the excellent DSL tools!

I do have a few things that could be improved, but that's not for here : But MS definitely need to continue to invest in development of T4! Simply Ged. Whilst it has always been possible with two instances of visual studio in the past one attaching to the the other which is running the template , this is a much needed improvement.

Would be great to see syntax highlighting be a native part of VS - plugins are a OK, but to me you're signalling that T4 is on it's way to becoming a first class citizen, so would be great if you could give it full citizenship :.

Nick Williams. Binary - I don't understand. My example doesn't have a base class. What part of T4 generates something you don't like. Please forgive my ignorance.

Scott Hanselman. Great news! I'd like to see inbuilt syntax highlighting too. The 3rd party editors are ok, but the quality needs to be better. Well of course we love T4 because it makes our lifes so much easier and prevents us from putting typos in repeated tasks and helps us code faster by using reusable templates. But I suppose that syntax highlightig although provided by third party tools would work better when provided within VS since VS supports this file format.

T4 should be no exception. Robert Koritnik. Binary: T4 doesn't enforce any base classes to your generated files.

Nobody even said that T4 should spit out code. It could as well be content. What base class can content have? None of course. Content is content.

One could easily generate a text file with lines each with a random number in it for whatever purpose of their application We've updated it a few times and have used it in pretty much every project we've worked on. So much time and code writing can be saved with T4, especially the kind of code that follows the same tried and tested pattern CRUD ops, etc.

T4 is definately underestimated and not talked about enough, especially for such a powerfull tool. Debugging T4 is always painful.

Small mistakes go somewhat unnoticed and most of the error messages tend to be cryptic. After a while you get used to it lol. But please do continue to invest in T4! Miguel Alho. A reason T4 syntax highlighting has been so valuable is as a poor man's debugger. Now we get a rich man's debugger. Kudos to Gareth Jones and others for caring enough to do something.

Long live scaffolding! Jeremy Cook. I love T4 - and that debugging is built into Visual Studio it will be even easier to use than [an unnamed templating tool, rhymes with "ModeSmith"]. David McClelland. I love T4! The only real barrier for adoption in our company until now has been in debugging the templates! This is an awesome leap forward and I really do hope that Microsoft keeps improving T4. I would love to be able to watch it spit out code as it goes. That looks great. One more thing to look at would be the generation of multiple files from a single tt file.

It can be done, but it doesn't feel right. It's not a huge pain, just a tiny little cut Tim Larson. Love T4 templates - they are the backbone to most basic object mapping systems, and make life a little easier.

Karl Schulze. And it opened my eyes to the power of "writing code that writes code". Once the non technical user was done, they would check in their changes, and then the automated build would check out the file, run my T4 utility to parse it and turn it into C code.

Then the code file was checked in, compiled and tested. The NON Tech users would actually have the ability to break the build and need to fix it themselves!

How cool is that? To this day, it's one of my greatest professional accomplishments. Thanks T4 team!!! William Gregg. Big fan of T4. Please continue to make productive improvements like this one. I love T4 templates and this will make them much easier to use.

Brian Feucht. We use T4 as an ORM of sorts. In our case, it replaced CodeSmith. It generates stored procedures, database layer, service layer and even some front-end stuff as a starting point that we then hand edit. Timothy Lee Russell. Great to hear that debugging T4 templates in VS will be easier. The old method of debugging launching a second VS instance to debug the first instance was cumbersome and rarely ever worked correctly.

I owe Gareth and Tim a beer for this one! As for syntax highlighting I've tried all three of the third-party T4 syntax highlighters, and haven't really been impressed with any of them.

They're buggy, sluggish, and their intellisense is abysmal. I'd kill for VS. Net to have native support for T4 as a first-class citizen. James Messinger. Jim Mitten. I always thought "great, now they implemented the next epic feature, but while working with VS you get poked by a thousand little things".

VS was already a big step in the right direction. NuGet was an awesome feature making a lot of workflows a ton easier, and VS will ease the whole process. Also I am really "proud" of you guys for using awesome open source projects, contributing to them to get even better and not playing "big bad Microsoft" which would have tried to swallow a lot of those projects.

Even placing MVC as open source speaks volumes and just gives a "good feeling". This is an essential block you need to be able to cope with anything going wrong in the process of using T4 templates. Thanks Andreas. Andreas Kroll. Never used it BUT, I just got an awesome idea like 3 days ago that would only be possible with T4. So I'm happy with the update! We use it in almost every web project such a great feature and best kept secret ever in VS!

It's not just about code generation, it makes our life easier and safer from typos and mistakes. I always thought expressing thanks was socially acceptable even here as I have done it before without reproach.

Maybe I haven't read the whole thread carefully enough, but wouldn't the solution be to switch to runtime t4 templates instead of design time? Thank you for the input, and sorry for the late response. With today's tools your approach seems more reasonable honestly. Possibly T4 text templates have matured since, and your link references VS Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. GarethJ GarethJ 6, 28 28 silver badges 42 42 bronze badges.

I will need to rethink my approach. Thank you very much for the time you took to review my question and to provide a meaningful answer. I must suck at Googling because it took forever to find this straight-forward answer to this question. I wanted to run custom tool on T4MVC.

AutoT4MVC would cause errors when removing a controller and then building and any pre-build solution I found was way too much trouble for something as simple as this should be. So, I just decided to set a hotkey for "Build. Tim Fischer Tim Fischer 21 1 1 bronze badge. Felipe Oriani Wolfgang Grinfeld Wolfgang Grinfeld 1 1 silver badge 1 1 bronze badge.

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