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Hanselminutes Podcast 152 - Code Generation and T4 with Kathleen Dollard

March 10, 2009 Comment on this post [4] Posted in Podcast
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dollard My one-hundred-and-fifty-second podcast is up. Scott chats with Kathleen Dollard about the past and the future of Code Generation. Scott's infatuated with T4, but does it have a future?

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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March 12, 2009 11:40
Very interesting podcast, code generation is one of my favorite topics. Well done!

Now if you could just interview Jb Evain (the guy who wrote cecil for the Mono project)...

As an aside, T4 has some very negative connotations here in Europe.
Einar W. Høst
March 18, 2009 0:24
It's a shame the T4 name was chosen - it has an infamous, abhorrent etymology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_T4
RichB
March 26, 2009 20:36
I still don't quite get Kathleen's fascination with VB9 XML Literals. If you write the access code also in VB9, then I see how it makes sense because the compiler translates XML calls into LINQ to XML. But if you're just using a VB9 assembly for the XML literals, and then you want to access the data structure from C#, you have to write the LINQ to XML yourself, so I don't see what it buys you.

What I do is generate data binding classes using an XSD (I'm using XmlGen#, which I wrote, but you can use xsd.exe if you want ... See XmlGen# here). I then create an XML file to hold the data. I embed the XML data into the assembly as an embedded resource. I then create a class with a singleton property that loads the XML data using the generated data binding classes.

This way I can do everything in C# without mixing languages. It works for me.
Kevin Dietz
March 27, 2009 23:34
Here's a 4-part video series I created that describes how I'm using T4.

Click Here for T4 Video Series
Kevin Dietz

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.