Visual Studio 2010 PowerShell Code Generator. T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) Code Generation - Best Kept Visual Studio Secret. How to use a T4 template for View Generation - ADO.NET team blog. Background To set the stage for this article, do take a look at Exploring the Performance of the ADO.NET Entity Framework - Part 1 to learn more about pre-generating views and how they can reduce the startup time for applications that consume ADO.NET Entity Data Models.
A while back, Jaroslaw Kowalski from our team posted a great reply about using EdmGen.exe to generate views for your ADO.NET Entity Data Model in this forum question. This information is also available on MSDN for reference. While using EdmGen.exe is a good approach for certain view generation scenarios, it is somewhat problematic in the following situations when you use it inside Visual Studio: 1.
It does not work with EDMX files (you need to give it the individual CSDL, MSL and SSDL files) 2. 3. This article presents an easier and more intuitive approach to generate pre-compiled views with the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (a.k.a. T4 template for view generation Introduction 1. 2. 3. Usage C# projects 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. First steps with the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) I recently tried out the Guidance Automation Toolkit and its "run-time" companion Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX/GAT - July 2007 CTP) on VS Rosario November CTP image.
The GAT enables you to extent the Visual Studio 2005/2008 experience. Extensibility comes in different forms and shapes but the GAT is geared helping the developer when creating a VS solution. It gives "guidance" in the form VS project or item templates combined with automation hooks (recipes) that can collect information from the developer (wizards) while the solution structure is being created (un-folded).
GAT find it's origin in the Microsoft Software Factory Initiative. The Software Factories provide you with a set of proven practices for building distributed applications. These practices are exposed through architectural overviews, patterns, how-to topics, reference implementations, automated guidance packages, and application blocks. The idea behind GAT is not completely new. So I see certainly advantages. Can't get Recipe arguments into template - using UnfoldTemplateAction.