T4 Editor Overview

Devart T4 Editor is a powerful Visual Studio add-in for editing T4 templates with syntax highlighting, intellisense, code outlining, and all features of a first-class text editor add-in for Visual Studio. It provides very high performance and makes creating T4 templates easier and faster. As well as ensuring extremely high level of performance, it also speeds up and facilitates the creation of T4 templates.

Intellisense

Devart T4 Editor provides comprehensive intellisense including all Visual Studio C# and Visual Basic intellisense features - tooltips, parameter info, code completion, and additionally supports a completion list for template directives. T4 Editor intellisense lists all available C# classes and members, even those in included template files and in referenced assemblies.

Syntax Highlighting

Devart T4 Editor highlights template directives, C# and Visual Basic code. You can easily distinguish text from the function calls. Fonts and colors for templates can be customized like in any other Visual Studio code editor.

Goto

Devart T4 Editor allows you to navigate to definitions and declarations of objects and members if they are present in the template file or included files.

Include

Devart T4 Editor supports multilevel template inclusion. All classes from included templates are available in intellisense, and you can navigate to them with Go To menu commands.

Outlining

Devart T4 Editor supports the fast and convenient code folding feature. A capability to hide or display T4 control blocks makes it easier to understand and edit T4 templates.

Editor Customization

You can enable or disable intellisense, word wrapping, virtual whitespace, line numbers, etc. Fonts and colors for syntax highlighting can also be changed.

Indenting

Devart T4 Editor provides customizable and intelligent indenting.You don't need to add spaces or tab characters manually.

Code Formatting

Devart T4 Editor allows you to format templates automatically.

Support for Large Templates

Devart T4 Editor quickly parses even large template files with lots of included files. It provides high performance when parsing and editing templates.

Entity Developer

T4 Editor is also available as a part of Entity Developer - a powerful modeling and code generation tool for ADO.NET Entity Framework, NHibernate, LinqConnect, and LINQ to SQL.

Entity Developer offers advanced code generation based on T4 templates. It supports specifying various properties of a template, such as its name, type, generation paths and some others within the template itself. You can even add your own properties to templates to make the code generation more flexible. For example, you can add the Generate property to every class and then exclude some classes from generated code by changing the value of this property in the designer. Code generation output for entities and context can be redirected to different folders or Visual Studio projects, simplifying the development of multi-layer solutions.

Entity Developer comes with several predefined templates: POCO, Self-Tracking, DbContext, and Fluent mapping templates for Entity Framework, POCO and Fluent mapping templates for NHibernate, and the POCO template with XML mapping for LINQ to SQL. These templates are quality-designed and thoroughly tested.

System Requirements

Devart T4 Editor requires Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, or 2019 to be installed.