Over the last few posts, I've talked about the exciting improvements we've made to T4 Text Templating in Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010. Here's a quick roundup: Firstly, T4 no longer locks referenced assemblies in memory , meaning it's much easier to use reflection in T4 templates and to use compiled...

I’m pleased to say that we made a few nice improvements to our T4 text templating engine in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (you can find the beta here ). Chief among them is resolving an assembly locking issue that more than a few customers have told us has caused them pain. The most typical cases for folks...

As Jason Zander and Cameron have announced, we've just released the first Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2010, the Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack. This pack is available to all MSDN subscribers and among a host of other great features, adds T4-based code generation to our UML static class diagrams...

Although data-binding to WPF is a feature of DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010, that hasn’t stopped our vibrant community from hacking away to get results today with VS2008. Have a look at this selection of posts: Using WPF As The Designer Surface In DSL Tools Provide an improved user experience to your...

I've been remiss generally in not blogging while we've been heads down on Visual Studio Beta1, but never more so than in respect of another T4 Editor that's recently become available. The good folks over at Tangible Engineering have been releasing several versions of their T4 Editor for Visual Studio...

Jean-Marc announced today that the latest new beta version of DSL Tools launched today hot on the heels of the recent Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 SDK beta releases. The team is really proud of all the great features we're shipping in this release. I hope you enjoy them too. From Jean-Marc...

Most of the code we generate with DSL Tools is pretty agnostic about its location or the filename you use for the template or the generated output. The one exception to this is the generated resource file (usually a pair called DomainModelResx.tt/DomainModelResx.resx) The reason this puppy is a little...

Don has a great post on where the p&p team are going with Software Factories and GAT/GAX . No doubt we'll be talking to those good folks about how they can take advantage of new features in DSL 2010 in their 2010 versions of Factories. Technorati Tags: Software Factories , VSX , T4 , DSL Tools

I just noticed that the good folks over at TellMe (a relatively new bit of Microsoft) have shipped a beta of their Voice Studio voice application dev tool, based on DSL Tools. Very cool indeed! (I seem to be saying this a lot lately) I love the process of developing voice apps - One of the last things...

I see that Clarius have now got to an alpha stage for the next stage of their T4 editing toolset. As well as their Community Edition and Pro Edition, they're now going to offer a full-featured code generation environment they're calling Visual T4 Code Generator , including tight integration with server...

Abhishek from the MVC team has just posted some detailed instructions on using the new T4 customization features in the ASP.Net MVP release candidate Very cool. Technorati Tags: T4 , ASP.Net MVC , Code generation , Visual Studio

Ok, the big guns are pitching in now :-) Hot on the heels of the tooling for LINQ-to-Entities folks adopting T4 for their next release , comes another. Scott Guthrie just blogged about a new RC of ASP.Net MVC that will shortly be coming along.  It's a long post, but down in the section on view templates...

A couple of months ago, John K. Waters of Redmond Developer News was kind enough to interview Rob Conery and I about T4 and code generation in general. You can find the results here . Technorati Tags: T4 , Code Generaton , Text Templating , Visual Studio

Lat time we looked at the "WHy" of T4 preprocessing - now let's look at an overview of the how. To explain the new features, it's helpful to have a look at the current way data flows through T4 2008. Let's suppose you have a trivial template generating some trivial output: Now to get from...

Strictly, this isn't a DSL 2010 feature, but a general Visual Studio 2010 feature; T4 is only coupled organizationally to DSL Tools, not technically, but it fits into our current announcements, so I won't worry about that too much. Over the last year or so, I've been fielding an increasing number of...

Sebastian Talamoni has a nice guide to adding a menu using a vsct file. Technorati Tags: DSL Tools , VSX

Jean-Marc has just released a complete walkthrough of DSL Tools for Visual Studio 2008 aimed at DSL beginners as a lab on CodeGallery. Here you can see the language from the lab designing mouse gestures for manipulating primitives in a simple graphics program. Very nice indeed. Technorati Tags: DSL Tools...

So after all the excitement of the PDC, now TechEd Europe is upon us and we're finally talking in some more depth about where we're going in Visual Studio 2010 with DSL Tools. Firstly, quite a few of you have been pinging me to ask about the relationship between DSL Tools and Oslo . See Keith and Stuart...

Adam has a groovy post on T4 , but he's under the impression that you can't use C# extension methods in T4. I just wanted to discuss the limitations that exist and show how you can take advantage of this cool C#/VB 3.5 feature. Extension methods require you to declare a top-level static class, and don...

Hot on the heels of all the interest Scott's post has generated in T4, Jon Stonecash has a useful consolidation of T4 links . Technorati Tags: T4

Just a quick note that there are a couple of DSL/T4 specific sessions among the plethora of great VSX content just posted by Anthony . Jean-Marc's DSL 101 Session Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools Domain-Specific Language Models are a powerful technique for embodying in a tool...

These videos have been around for quite a while now, but I suddenly realised that I didn't have any links to them on the blog. It's an hour or so of Ted and I chewing the fat on the why's and wherefores of Domain-Specific Development. If this is your bag and you can put up with my shiny blue MSFT shirt...

Aaron just pointed out to me that Scott Hanselman has been lavishing love on T4 , Oleg's techniques library and the Clarius T4 Editor . Nice one Scott. Scott also notes that Rob is using it to create a nice repository over a DB for his SubSonic project. And of course, its always worth another namecheck...

We're considering dropping this support in the next version of Visual Studio and restricting T4 to being called as a managed API. If this presents problems for you because you have a dependency on the COM interface, please shout now. Technorati Tags: T4 , VSX , DSL Tools

Victor pinged me to say that Clarius had launched their eagerly-awaited T4 editor for Visual Studio . That's pretty exciting news for all those of use who edit T4 templates on a daily basis - that's almost everyone these days, right? ;-) Technorati Tags: T4 , VSX , Clarius , T4Editor