Presented at DevEvening Melbourne # 1.

1. Introducing T4 Templates Chris Melinn

2. Agenda This presentation will provide a short overview of T4. We will learn the basics of creating a template and then see a few examples of how T4 is used by others.

3. The Basics

4. What is T4? T4 = Text Template Transformation Toolkit

6. SQL

8. The Default Visual Studio Editor

9. Fortunately, there is a solution… Free Visual T4 Editor Community Edition from Clarius Consulting

10. The Visual T4 Editor (inside Visual Studio)

11. DEMO #1 Creating Templates

12. How it works T4 engine performs two steps to generate output from a template: Source: Oleg Sych http://www.olegsych.com/

13. Applications of T4 Examples of T4 in the wild

14. “If you’re going to do something twice or more, manually, in your company, generate it.” ~ Scott Hanselman

15. T4 can be used to generate…

16. DEMO #2 ASP.NET MVC CodeTemplates

17. DEMO #3 T4CSS

18. Summary For more information…

19. Resources Oleg Sych’sblog is the best collection of T4 resources I have found anywhere http://www.olegsych.com/ His CodePlex project, T4 Toolbox, contains several ready-to-use code generation templates and other supporting extensions. http://www.codeplex.com/t4toolbox

20. Editing Tools Visual T4 Editor from Clarius Consulting http://www.visualt4.com/ Tangible T4 Editor by Tangible Engineering http://t4-editor.tangible-engineering.com/T4-Editor-Visual-T4-Editing.html

21. Other Examples of T4 T4CSS http://haacked.com/archive/2009/12/02/t4-template-for-less-css.aspx T4MVC: Creates strongly typed helpers to eliminate your “magic strings” http://aspnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC Generate WPF and Silverlight Dependency Properties using T4 http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/DependencyPropertyCodeGen.aspx

22. Contact Me Blog: http://chrismelinn.wordpress.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/ChrisMelinn