.net - T4 without Visual Studio?

Question

I'm trying to wireup some code gen templates to my team's automated build process. Our SCM team doesn't want Visual Studio on our build machine (which I have a hard time arguing with).

Is there a way to install the T4 engine without Visual Studio?

Answer 1

I wrote a cleanly reverse-engineered implementation of a T4 engine for the MonoDevelop IDE. It's open-source, licensed under the permissive MIT/X11 license, so you are free to embed the engine in your app or redistribute it. There's also an implementation of the TextTransform.exe command-line tool available as a dotnet global tool, and some APIs in the Mono.TextTemplating namespace to aid in hosting the engine.

You can get packages from NuGet and the source is on GitHub.