The recently released T4 Editor version 2.2.1 provides support for Visual Studio 2013 Preview. It also includes a new template gallery which enables developers to share templates by dragging files from the gallery into solution explorer. You can also drop any file into your T4 editor window.
T4 Editor version 2.2.1 also enables you to create non-existing extensible properties inside a diagram while processing it by calling EnsureExtensiblePropertyDefined method and creating the required properties and default values while processing the model.
"The real benefit of our t4 editor is the added syntax highlighting of template as well as output code and the intellisense for template code and directive. Without it, editing .tt files is just like using notepad," said Bjorn Borgsdorf, CTO, Tangible Engineering GmbH.
With the help of the recent T4 release, you will be able to navigate to the relevant MSDN page or the online documentation for standard T4 directives by moving the cursor into the directive and pressing F1 key.
With the help of the latest release, it is possible to make use of project properties with include and assembly directives, which works not only in the standard IDE but also in the msbuild host. Gareth Jones, Program Manager, Visual Studio has demonstrated the usage of this feature with code snippets.
Another notable feature in the recently released update for T4 is that it uses the standard Visual Studio T4 host in ASP.NET scaffolding. This will enable you to leverage full potential of T4 and any include libraries you have when building scaffolding templates.
It is now possible to reduce IDE related memory problems which occurs as a result of big templates by making use of CleanupAfterProcessingtemplate property. You need to provide the relevant code inside your template and the relevant appdomain will run faster after that.
According to Gareth, the above feature will destroy T4 built-in caching behavior. but developers will be able to get a clean development environment. Moreover, the above code only runs in the Visual Studio IDE host.
