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I’m a bit quicker off the mark than I was with our Beta as this is my first day back from vacation after our Release Candidate has launched .  We have one final significant T4 feature to add for Visual Studio 2012 in addition to all of the stuff...

Our beta release has been available for a couple of weeks now, so I thought it was about time I updated folks on what’s new for T4 . Everything below is in addition to the features and changes I noted in my previous post, What’s new with T4 in the Developer...

Kalle over at abstractiondev has a nice series of videos getting started with T4 and developing a rich set of metadata to drive systematic generation. http://abstractiondev.wordpress.com/demo-videos/ He’s also not afraid to promote his ideas with conviction...

In among all the excitement of new ALM features like integrated Code Review and MyWork to manage your daily workflow in the developer preview, there are, of course, a few nice new features for T4. First of all, a naming change that's underway. We've heard...

  We’ve now got a third contender in the Visual Studio T4 Editor space.  The good folks over at DevArt have joined the race. From their press release: Devart today releases a new powerful Visual Studio add-in for editing T4 templates with syntax...

  A few weeks ago, I recorded a podcast about T4, and how it’s being used inside and outside Microsoft with the estimable David Starr , who I happened to meet up with at the recent MVP Summit . You can check it out in the PluralSight Pluralcast blog...

Some of you may have noticed that we’ve launched a new T4 official blog over at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/t4 . We wanted a single place to consolidate information about T4, whether it be from my team that produces the core T4 engine or the teams within...

Folks, if you want to work on Visual Studio, here's your chance. We've two openings for senior developers on my team working on building WPF-based experiences and the underlying infrastructure for agile/enterprise team dev tools. http://bit.ly/gb8P76...

You might have noticed in the recent storm of Web Tools releases that there’s a groovy new kid on the template engine block – Razor . A few customers have been asking folks on both teams some questions around this, such as the following. Why do you have...

Steve Sanderson has a nice post up about a project he's working on with the estimable Scott Hanselman . It's a NuGet package that provides an even easier on-ramp to development with the just-released ASP.NET MVC3 framework. In their words, it quickly...

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...

I promised in the last post that I’d show how to do template extensibility and customization using inheritance with regular templates, rather than the preprocessed kind, so here goes. The preprocessed solution was a three-layer design. The base preprocessed...

Last time, in Part II , I described a highly structured approach to creating and harnessing a preprocessed template to generate a simple C# class from metadata. I put lots of nice extensibility points in that template and now we’re going to exploit them...

  Last time , I outlined my scenario – we have a template that produces a very vanilla C# class from metadata and we’d like to customize it to produce something more directly applicable to our current project.  Of course, we could always just...

We’ve done a bunch of work on T4 in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 to enable template inheritance.  A reasonable question at this point would be “Why would you want inheritance in your text templates?” Well, the typical reason would be the same as with any...

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...

  As it’s the Silverlight Firestarter event today, the very cool WCF RIA Services team have released a new version of their toolkit. You can get the general skinny at Jeff Handley’s blog , but the bit that caught my attention was that they have updated...

Rab Hallett has a nice tool in the VS Gallery that uses T4 templates to generate mocks for unit-testing EF-based applications Maintenance-Free Mocking for Unit Testing with EntityFramework 4.0 Technorati Tags: T4 , Entity Framework , Unit Testing , Mock...

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...

OK, Visual Studio 2010 is well and truly released, so I thought I'd better catalog what goodness is in the box for all you T4 fans out there.. For template authors: Preprocessed templates to allow embedding of template-based generation in arbitrary applications...

The newly released Visualization and Modeling SDK for Visual Studio 2010 includes support for integrating T4 with msbuild. (yay!) The ever-diligent Oleg Sych has the full skinny here . Technorati Tags: T4 , msbuild , Visual Studio 2010

The estimable MVP and T4 enthusiast, Kathleen Dollard has a new post where she's using T4's ability to spit arbitrary text as a host for a textual DSL. She's set up a small DSL for describing contract interfaces for a MEF framework: new Interface() {...

My esteemed colleague Peter Provost – whom I consistently fail to convince that I’m not into process engineering ;-) - has the first in what I’m sure will be a very informative series on extending the UML designers in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition...

A couple of folks out there have put together some really neat T4 templates that use the host-specific flag and then access Visual Studio's DTE object model to read state from other code in the project and use that as metadata for code generation. Daniel...

Colin Eberhardt has a nice article on The Code Project walking through using a small textual DSL encoded in XML to define a set of dependency properties and then using that as a data source for T4 to generate all of the necessary boilerplate code. Apart...