Design-time T4 templates in ASP.NET 5 (VS 2015)

Question

I can\'t seem to find a way to make T4 templates in VS 2015 RTM, in an ASP.NET 5 (vNext) project.

I even installed the T4 toolbox for Visual Studio 2015 extension, b

Answer 1

I've found that I can still use the MSBuild targets that ship with the Modeling SDK for Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 when building an ASP.NET 5 project with ASP.NET 5 RC1.

I got there by modifying the directions from MSDN - Code Generation in a Build Process.

1. Add the *.tt and the output files (*.cs in my case) to the project folder structure.
2. Unload and edit the project's *.xproj file.

3. Add the following Import element after the Microsoft.DNX.targets import:

4. Add an ItemGroup element similar to the following (I added this immediately before the import statements):

   
     
       TextTemplatingFileGenerator
       MyTemplate.cs
     
   
   

5. Optionally, you can add elements to the Globals PropertyGroup element to control the transformation task:

   true
   false
   true
   

6. Reload the project's *.xproj and build normally.

The templates I'm using are pretty simple, so there might be limitations of this approach that I'm missing out on.