My multiple outputs from t4 made easy post contained a class making it easy to produce multiple files from Visual Studio’s text templating engine (T4).

While useful it had a few issues:

A quick round-up of some useful LINQ to SQL related resources that are available for developers. I’ve not used everything on this list myself so don’t take this as personal endorsement.

Note: While the T4 templating language is built-in to Visual Studio 2008/2010 it does not come with syntax highlighting or IntelliSense. Check out either:

An improved version is now available.

One of the things I wanted my LINQ to SQL T4 templates to do was be able to split the output into a file-per-entity. Existing solutions used either a separate set of templates with duplicate code or intrusive handling code throughout the template. Here’s my helper class to abstract the problem away from what is already complicated enough template code.

This post is over 10 years old. These templates are no longer maintained and the information may be outdated.

My templates that allow you to customize the LINQ to SQL code-generation process (normally performed by SQLMetal/LINQ to SQL classes designer) have been updated once again.

A newer version of this LINQ to SQL template is available.

If you want to customize the LINQ to SQL code generation phase in your project without additional tool dependencies this could be what you’re looking for.

A newer version of this LINQ to SQL template is available.

The topic of modifying the code generation phase of LINQ to SQL comes up quite often and the limited T4 template I published here last month was good at showing the potential but wasn’t a practical replacement for the code generation phase.

A newer version of this LINQ to SQL template is available

While SQLMetal does a good job of turning your SQL schema into a set of classes for you it doesn’t let you customize the code generation process.