Try this little toy to help with colouring / syntax. Haven't got the exact link Tangible Modelling Tools with T4 editor or something similar... Rob
_____ From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Greg Keogh Sent: Saturday, 19 June 2010 3:57 PM To: 'ozDotNet' Subject: T4 templates Folks, I've been experimenting with T4 <http://www.olegsych.com/2007/12/text-template-transformation-toolkit/> templates and the T4 Toolkit and I'm reasonably impressed. I never knew this tool existed until David K mentioned it a few months ago. If anyone else in here needs basic file generation from templates then T4 is great. It's nicely lightweight and easy to learn compared to the huge expensive bloat of something like CodeSmith. Some comments: Without a colour coding IDE it's a dreadful eye and brain strain to write the templates, as all the source and template mingled with <#+ and #> delimiters looks like spaghetti. I've seen ads for some non-free products for T4 editing, but I personally don't need them. My largest template (my first) is about 300 lines long and it took hours to write by hand in a plain text editor. One tiny mistake and you're stuffed with cryptic errors and you have to carefully inspect what you've done to find the cause. I tried to following Oleg's debugging instructions once, but it stalled VS2008 and I had to kill the task. T4 #@ import directives have poor support for relative paths to templates, so it's hard to put your tt files in a shared location. Oleg's article uses a registry edit to set a default search path. This is rather irritating. When you use a "generator" to punch out multiple files, you always get one spurious extra empty file that is the same name as the template. This is a minor irritation that I can't find a way of avoiding. Overall through, it's a great free tool. Greg
