What T4 editing tools exist?

Question

I don't use T4 templates often; usually when I do it is editing those of other projects (specifically SubSonic & T4MVC). The experience is always quite unpleasant (and this is certainly why I don't use them more often).

These are the tools I know of, and neither of them quite fit the bill.

1. Clarius Visual T4.

   • Does not support Visual Studio 2010. Their blog mentions work ongoing, but that was 2 months ago with no updates since. Their support forum is filled with spam and questions about when VS2010 will be supported.
     Most of the projects I work on are in Visual Studio 2010, and the templates I deal with require themselves to be run in the Visual Studio host (as they access project information through VS's automation object model). This is why I am looking for a VS2010 compatible editor.

2. Tangible T4 Editor

   • The first time I attempted to use this, I thought Visual Studio 2010 had crashed. Turns out I didn't wait long enough (it took over 2 minutes for the editor window to appear). Call me picky, but this alone puts me off of this tool.

   • I have a modified T4MVC template that works. After I install Tangible's T4 editor, the template fails with several errors. If I then uninstall Tangible's T4 editor, the template works again. So it would seem something about the editor changes the behavior of T4 in Visual Studio. Perhaps obviously, that's entirely unacceptable.

Are there any other T4 editors I missed? Does anyone else use these tools, encounter these same issues, and successfully work with them?

I should also say, the most important feature for me is simply to distinguish between code that runs as part of the template and code/text that gets output. Everything else is gravy.

Rosanne

No, I think you have both serious contenders listed there already. – Capper

@marc_s: ya, pretty sure that's the situation. This question is sort of a last-ditch effort to find something else. – Rosanne

@qstarin: I'm anxiously awaiting the VS2010 version of the Clarius editor myself.... – Capper

@marc_s: I was too, until I saw the state of things over there. They can't even be bothered to clean the spam out of their support forum; how can I have any real expectation of a new working version when questions about it go answered for half a year while spam piles up. – Rosanne

Why others when T4 Editor from Tangible is mostly used therefore is probably most feature complete, stable and does the job. I use it and works fine. – Betterment

@Robert: Did you read my bullet points? Do they have a working VS 2010 version? – Rosanne

@qstarin: Of course. I'm using Visual Studio 2010 Premium and it works just fine. It doesn't crash IDE and templates work as expected. Do you maybe have other tools installed along that may cause this unstable behaviour? I installed these extensions: AnkhSVN, Tangible T4 tools, Ghost Doc, JSEnhancements, NuGet, and Productivity Powertools... Works as expected. – Betterment

Sure, I have other extensions .. NuGet, ReSharper, VisualSVN, SparkSense. I've tried disabling most everything and still get very long hang times. It's possible simply the install of another add-in may be causing what I experience, but frankly I don't have the time to vet that out. I don't experience this behavior without Tangible's editor installed. – Rosanne

Answer 1

DevArt has released a T4 editor add on for Visual Studio. It is free and it works well. They do not appear to have a version for Visual Studio 2012 yet, however.

I have also come across a ReSharper plugin for editing T4 files, but I have not used it and cannot comment on how well it works (or does not).

Rosanne

Answer 2

Check out the T4 Toolbox.

Qatar

That's not exactly providing any syntax highlighting and editor intellisense or anything like that.... great toolkit - but definitely no editor add-on to make working with T4 files easier.... – Capper

Thanks, but as marc_s said, nothing there helps solve my problem. – Rosanne