Get Visual Studio to run a T4 Template on every build

I agree with GarethJ - in VS2010 it is much easier to regenerate tt templates on each build. Oleg Sych's blog describes how to do it. In short:

1. Install Visual Studio SDK
2. Install Visual Studio 2010 Modeling and Visualization SDK
3. Open in text editor project file and add to the end of file but before </Project>

That's it. Open your project. On each build all *.tt templates will be reprocessed

<!-- This line could already present in file. If it is so just skip it  -->
<Import Project="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />
<!-- process *.tt templates on each build  -->
<PropertyGroup>
    <TransformOnBuild>true</TransformOnBuild>
</PropertyGroup>
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TextTemplating\v10.0\Microsoft.TextTemplating.targets" />

I used JoelFan's answer to come up w/ this. I like it better because you don't have to remember to modify the pre-build event every time you add a new .tt file to the project.

• add TextTransform.exe to your %PATH%
• created a batch file named transform_all.bat (see below)
• create a pre-build event "transform_all ..\.."

transform_all.bat

@echo off
SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION

:: set the working dir (default to current dir)
set wdir=%cd%
if not (%1)==() set wdir=%1

:: set the file extension (default to vb)
set extension=vb
if not (%2)==() set extension=%2

echo executing transform_all from %wdir%
:: create a list of all the T4 templates in the working dir
dir %wdir%\*.tt /b /s > t4list.txt

echo the following T4 templates will be transformed:
type t4list.txt

:: transform all the templates
for /f %%d in (t4list.txt) do (
set file_name=%%d
set file_name=!file_name:~0,-3!.%extension%
echo:  \--^> !file_name!    
TextTransform.exe -out !file_name! %%d
)

echo transformation complete