Note: This is strictly my opinion and in no way should be conveyed as the opinion of anyone else.
Now that the Win 8.1 Preview is out I can give my personal opinion on it. First we should discuss some of the new features and then whether it is a mandatory upgrade or not. Note that I’m ignoring all the new features around corporate environments and Windows Store apps.
In the previous article we updated the build process to support environmental config transforms in projects and to have the transforms run on any build. In this article we are going to package up the implementation to make it very easy to add to any project. There are a couple of things we want to wrap up.
Configuration file transforms have been around for quite a while and most companies use them to generate different config files for each environment but Visual Studio does not really support the functionality most companies need.In this article I’m going to talk about why the existing Visual Studio implementation is flawed and how to fix it so that you can have true environmental transforms that are actually useful.
For purposes of this article we will assume a simple web application (although it applies to any application) that will be deployed to 2 different environments – test and production. We will also assume that developers debug the application on their local machine and therefore should not have to do any special tasks to debug the application locally. As such we’ll have a 3th, default, environment – debug.
In this final article in the series we’re finishing up the deployment projects started last time. When we’re complete we’ll have a set up projects that can be used to build and deploy T4 templates where needed. The projects will be able to support any number of templates so maintenance will be simple even as more templates are added. In the previous article we moved the core template functionality into a library that we can expand upon. We also set up an item template project to store the root T4 template that someone would use. In this article we’re going to create the project to store the nested templates (we’ll discuss why later) along with the Visual Studio Extension (vsix) file that will be used to install everything.
In this (almost) final post in the series on creating an AppSettings wrapper in T4 we’re going to package all the work we’ve done into an easily deployable and reusable package that we can extend to include other templates. We’ll also make sure that adding the template to a project is as easy as Add New Item.
Here’s the list of things we’ll accomplish
Update 28 Aug 2016: Refer to this link for updated code supporting Visual Studio 2015.
This is the table of contents for the series on using T4 to create an AppSettings wrapper for use in any code.
In the last article we broke out the template into 2 separate template files: main and nested. A developer adds the main template to their project but it includes the nested template where the actual work is done. In this article we’re going to update the included template to allow a developer to alter the generated code without having to touch the nested template.
In the original article we listed 6 requirements for the template. At this point we have met half of them. By adding customization we will meet the final three. They are:
In a previous article I discussed how to host a private NuGet repository.If you aren’t familiar with NuGet then please refer to that article. If you’re hosting a private gallery then chances are you’re on a network (probably an Active Directory one). One downside to hosting a private NuGet gallery is that it is tied to Forms authentication. For a public repository this makes sense but for a private one it would be better to have NuGet use Windows authentication. This article will discuss the changes that have to be made to the NuGet source to support Windows authentication. The changes are scattered but minor.
In the previous article we finished the basic appsettings template that allowed us to generate a strongly typed class from the settings in a configuration file. We now want to expand the template to allow it to be customized depending upon the needs of the project, a later article. Before we get there though it is time to refactor the code to make it more reusable and easier to maintain. That is the focus of this article.
In the previous article we expanded the template to dynamically set the type and namespace names based upon the project the template is used in.Now we are going to turn our focus to generating properties for each of the settings in the configuration file. For this we’ll be adding more code to the class block to open and read the settings from the project’s configuration file (which we’ll have to write code to retrieve). We’ll also have to decide how to convert string values to typed equivalents.