Community developer blogs

Gareth Jones

Recent Posts

• Tangible T4 Editor

  Posted: 23 May 2009 at 05:30 by GarethJ

  I've been remiss generally in not blogging while we've been heads down on Visual Studio Beta1, but never more so than in respect of another T4 Editor that's recently become available. The good folks over at Tangible Engineering have been releasing several versions of their T4 Editor for Visual Studio 2008 and now have released a shiny version for Visual Studio 2010 Beta1. How's that for speedy?

• DSL Tools 2010 Beta1 Launches!

  Posted: 23 May 2009 at 03:37 by GarethJ

  Jean-Marc announced today that the latest new beta version of DSL Tools launched today hot on the heels of the recent Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 SDK beta releases. The team is really proud of all the great features we're shipping in this release. I hope you enjoy them too. From Jean-Marc's blog: Different models can now interact with each other, (and with Visual Studio Team System Architecture UML designers), using the ModelBus.

• Customizing Generated Resources in DSL Tools

  Posted: 23 May 2009 at 03:15 by GarethJ

  Most of the code we generate with DSL Tools is pretty agnostic about its location or the filename you use for the template or the generated output. The one exception to this is the generated resource file (usually a pair called DomainModelResx.tt/DomainModelResx.resx) The reason this puppy is a little more sensitive is that the output resx is generated as item with a compile type of Embedded Resource in the Dsl csharp project that it lives in.

• Software Factories Redux

  Posted: 28 Feb 2009 at 18:09 by GarethJ

  Don has a great post on where the p&p team are going with Software Factories and GAT/GAX. No doubt we'll be talking to those good folks about how they can take advantage of new features in DSL 2010 in their 2010 versions of Factories. Technorati Tags: Software Factories, VSX, T4, DSL Tools

• TellMe Voice Studio Beta1

  Posted: 06 Feb 2009 at 08:58 by GarethJ

  I just noticed that the good folks over at TellMe (a relatively new bit of Microsoft) have shipped a beta of their Voice Studio voice application dev tool, based on DSL Tools. Very cool indeed! (I seem to be saying this a lot lately) I love the process of developing voice apps - One of the last things I did in Microsoft before joining Visual Studio was to build a voice-enabled kiosk for helping folks access local government services. It was seriously rewarding when you managed to have testers

• Clarius take T4 editing to the next level

  Posted: 04 Feb 2009 at 22:23 by GarethJ

  I see that Clarius have now got to an alpha stage for the next stage of their T4 editing toolset. As well as their Community Edition and Pro Edition, they're now going to offer a full-featured code generation environment they're calling Visual T4 Code Generator, including tight integration with server explorer, database tables and XML as well as a multi-file generation implementation out of the box and lots more beside. Here's a short video of their database support: Once again, very nice indee

• More on T4 in ASP.Net MVC

  Posted: 04 Feb 2009 at 22:08 by GarethJ

  Abhishek from the MVC team has just posted some detailed instructions on using the new T4 customization features in the ASP.Net MVP release candidate Very cool. Technorati Tags: T4, ASP.Net MVC, Code generation, Visual Studio

• T4 Adoption continues with ASP.Net MVC Tools

  Posted: 12 Jan 2009 at 23:52 by GarethJ

  Ok, the big guns are pitching in now :-) Hot on the heels of the tooling for LINQ-to-Entities folks adopting T4 for their next release, comes another. Scott Guthrie just blogged about a new RC of ASP.Net MVC that will shortly be coming along.  It's a long post, but down in the section on view templates in the scaffolding system, he mentions that they use T4 as a one-time generation technology to set these up based on your data. Of course, this means that the generation is fully customizable

• T4 Interview in Redmond Developer News

  Posted: 09 Jan 2009 at 01:53 by GarethJ

  A couple of months ago, John K. Waters of Redmond Developer News was kind enough to interview Rob Conery and I about T4 and code generation in general. You can find the results here. Technorati Tags: T4,Code Generaton,Text Templating,Visual Studio

• DSL 2010 Feature Dives: T4 Preprocessing - Part Two - Basic Design

  Posted: 12 Nov 2008 at 00:38

  Lat time we looked at the "WHy" of T4 preprocessing - now let's look at an overview of the how. To explain the new features, it's helpful to have a look at the current way data flows through T4 2008. Let's suppose you have a trivial template generating some trivial output: Now to get from the te

• DSL 2010 Feature Dives: T4 Preprocessing - Part One - Rationale

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 22:03

  Strictly, this isn't a DSL 2010 feature, but a general Visual Studio 2010 feature; T4 is only coupled organizationally to DSL Tools, not technically, but it fits into our current announcements, so I won't worry about that too much. Over the last year or so, I've been fielding an increasing number of

• Nice step-by-step on adding a menu to DSL Tools 2008

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 21:12

  Sebastian Talamoni has a nice guide to adding a menu using a vsct file. Technorati Tags: DSL Tools, VSX

• New DSL Tools lab

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 20:51

  Jean-Marc has just released a complete walkthrough of DSL Tools for Visual Studio 2008 aimed at DSL beginners as a lab on CodeGallery. Here you can see the language from the lab designing mouse gestures for manipulating primitives in a simple graphics program. Very nice indeed. Technorati Tags: DSL

• Belated Welcome - Eyal Lantzman

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 20:10

  Very poor show of me - I forgot to welcome Eyal Lantzman to the team. Eyal recently joined the team in Cambridge, (I originally wrote "us" instead of "the team" there - note to self - must remember that I live in America now!). As part of this, he's made the big life change

• DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010 - the cat is well and truly out of the bag

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 20:00

  So after all the excitement of the PDC, now TechEd Europe is upon us and we're finally talking in some more depth about where we're going in Visual Studio 2010 with DSL Tools. Firstly, quite a few of you have been pinging me to ask about the relationship between DSL Tools and Oslo. See Keith and St

• Using extension methods in T4 templates

  Posted: 29 Oct 2008 at 23:54

  Adam has a groovy post on T4, but he's under the impression that you can't use C# extension methods in T4. I just wanted to discuss the limitations that exist and show how you can take advantage of this cool C#/VB 3.5 feature.Extension methods require you to declare a top-level static class, and don

• Another collection of T4 resources

  Posted: 23 Oct 2008 at 17:41

  Hot on the heels of all the interest Scott's post has generated in T4, Jon Stonecash has a useful consolidation of T4 links.Technorati Tags: T4

• New DSL Screencasts avaialble from VSX Conference

  Posted: 21 Oct 2008 at 19:15

  Just a quick note that there are a couple of DSL/T4 specific sessions among the plethora of great VSX content just posted by Anthony.Jean-Marc's DSL 101 SessionDomain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL ToolsDomain-Specific Language Models are a powerful technique for embodying in a tool the

• informIT video interview on DSL Tools with Ted Neward and Gareth Jones

  Posted: 15 Oct 2008 at 02:58

  These videos have been around for quite a while now, but I suddenly realised that I didn't have any links to them on the blog.It's an hour or so of Ted and I chewing the fat on the why's and wherefores of Domain-Specific Development. If this is your bag and you can put up with my shiny blue

• Hanselman gives T4 some love.

  Posted: 14 Oct 2008 at 21:00

  Aaron just pointed out to me that Scott Hanselman has been lavishing love on T4, Oleg's techniques library and the Clarius T4 Editor. Nice one Scott.Scott also notes that Rob is using it to create a nice repository over a DB for his SubSonic project.And of course, its always worth another namecheck