c# - Product of build-time T4 transformation is used only in the next build

Question

I have a VS project that contains:

1. a pre-build action running TextTransform on a template.tt to generate generated.cs

2. generated.cs listed as one of the files to compile (i.e. in the list of project files)

When I build the project, the pre-build action is executed, generated.cs is re-created, but VS compiles the previous version of generated.cs (which I guess it loaded in memory when the build process started).

How to make the build use the new version of generated.cs (i.e. the one generated in the pre-build action)? How to force the build order?

^{Note that the text transformation input is dynamic and hence cannot be done in design time.}

Answer 1

I don't think you need a custom pre-build action. Just add the ".tt" file to your project and set its "Custom Tool" property to "TextTemplatingFileGenerator". You might want to make sure that the *.generated.cs files are also added to the project, but I think that VS takes care of that.