Tuesday, March 17, 2009

It’s a T4 kind of day – Free (reg-ware) T4 Editor from tangible (with UML-Style modeling tools added for flavor)

tangible engineering GmbH - tangible's T4 Editor plus UML-Style modeling tools

“With tangible's T4 Editor you can author your own Code Generator via Text-Templates (TT-Files) with IntelliSense, Syntax-Highlighting. T4 is a Microsoft Language for writing Code Generators which is similar to ASP.NET and is used by the Microsoft internally to build software and new features for .NET 4.0. The T4 Code Generation Engine is already built into Visual Studio - so the only thing that was missing is a good Editor and some free UML-style modeling tools.. so we shipped it.

Now it is up to you to accelerate your projects and start saving your company money by adopting T4 today and generate the code you need directly form diagrams, database schemas or xml files.

PreviewT4Editor

T4 Editor Features - T4 Code Generation simplified

The T4 Editor for Syntax Highlighting and Intelli-Sense allows you to author our own code generators in Visual Studio that read from the diagrams, xml or any other data source.

  • Syntax Highlighting for C#, VB.NET, Java, PHP, SQL, MSIL, Python, Batch Files, PASCAL, PowerShell, IL, JSCRIPT, VBSCRIPT, CSS in generated code and T4 Code Sections in C# or VB.NET
  • Intelli-Sense, Intelli-Prompt and Statement Completition for T4 Code Sections. Intelli-Sense will look at all assemblies and namespaces indicated by the import and include pragma. *Limited support for namespaces in the FREE EDITION.
  • Syntax Error Reporting in ErrorList and via Text-Highlighting
  • Templates for Generating from XML Files or Diagrams
  • Access to our Online T4 Template Gallery

In case you do not want write templates your own, you also want to take a look at the tangible architect tour. With tangible architect you can generate an application from a model based on predefined code generation templates and also create your very own templates to run against any of your diagrams

Supported diagram types

With tangible modeling tools you can directly create Use Case Diagrams, Component Diagrams, State Charts, Class Diagrams, Activity Diagrams and Persistent Object Models. Which can also be used for code-generation by a T4 Template.

…”

T4 is one of those threads I’ve been watching since I learned of it last year. It seems to be too cool to not use.

I recently got fired up again on it after recently listening to Scott Hanselman chat with Kathleen Dollard about T4 on Hanselminutes Podcast #152

(via Visual Studio Gallery - T4 Editor FREE EDITION plus tangible modeling tool)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Clarius T4 Editor 1.0 RTMs
Interested in template based code generation? Own Visual Studio 2008? Then guess what? You already have one... Say hello to the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

>>>Syntax Highlighting for generated C#, VB.NET code?

It is just me or this is already built-in in VS? :-)

Greg said...

Nope, not for when editing T4 (*.tt) files...

Anonymous said...

I know for T4 files there is no built-in support, but the feature reads "syntax highlighted for *generated* C#, VB.NET, SQl, CSS, etc code".

Once the code is generated I can use VS itself to look and edit my C#, VB, SQL, CSS, etc, files.

This was my point.

Greg said...

I see... My bad.