A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

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A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

What's New — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:45:15 GMT

Earlier this week, I wrote a post on using a BuildProvider to create ActionLink helpers .  That

re: A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

pat — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:54:28 GMT

Nice! Is there a way to invoke this as a post build step and not through web.config?

re: A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

davidebb — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:03:28 GMT

Pat, the mechanism used here (BuildProvider and ControlBuilder) only exist at ASP.NET runtime, so there is no easy way to do it in a post build step. But there are some related approaches that process the T4 files at build time that are worth investigating as well.

David Ebbo's blog : A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

DotNetBurner - ASP.net MVC — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 06:01:11 GMT

DotNetBurner - burning hot .net content

re: A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

Tad — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:07:06 GMT

Is it possible to make these helpers act as a fluent interface ?

for example:

<%=ViewModel.Age.Label().TextBox().Validation() %>

re: A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

davidebb — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 23:14:36 GMT

Tad, the problem I see with this fluent approach is that it would output the three pieces of UI right one after the other, whereas in practice you may want them separated by some random HTML.

As far as whether it's possible, I think it should be by generating the write glue. Basically, if you can write helpers by hand that will do this, you can write a T4 template that will generate such helper!

re: A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

jcliff — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:35:59 GMT

A wonderful approach! - Such a shame Intellisense is not available when using ReSharper :(

re: A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

jcliff — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:52:33 GMT

Ref: Resharper Intellisense

Pressing Ctrl+8 to enable/disable code analysis in

current file will allow you to benefit from Intellisense :)

re: A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers

davidebb — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 17:28:29 GMT

jcliff: glad to hear that! So I take it doing this switches back to the standard VS intellisense engine instead of ReSharper's.

A T4 based approach to creating ASP.NET MVC strongly typed helpers - David Ebbo

DotNetShoutout — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:13:50 GMT

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A new and improved ASP.NET MVC T4 template

David Ebbo's blog — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:34:42 GMT

A couple weeks ago, I blogged about using a Build provider and CodeDom to generate strongly typed MVC