When Miguel asked me to investigate making MonoDevelop support using Razor templates in MonoTouch and Mono for Android apps, I realized that it could be done simply and with very few dependencies by taking the same approach as T4 preprocessed templates, which I implemented for MonoDevelop a couple of years ago. Fortunately, this time the hard part was already done: I could use Microsoft's open-source Razor parser instead of writing my own parser. I also found a Visual Studio extension called Razor Generator that was very close in functionality to what I wanted, and was able to use this as a basis for my work. I was able to hook it it into the fantastic Razor editing and code completion support written by Piotr Dowgiallo in the Google Summer of Code this year.
After a few days work implementing, tweaking and tuning (and bouncing ideas off Bojan Rajković), I present Razor Preprocessed Templates in MonoDevelop.
A few week ago, I travelled to GDC and MIX. While in planes, airports and in spare moments in the conference, I implemented a feature I've wanted for some time - integrated T4 templating. This takes the T4 engine that I wrote for ASP.NET MVC templates, and exposed it within the IDE as a "custom tool", like Visual Studio does.
This also meant I had to implement a simple version of VS-style custom tools, or generators. Set the file's "custom tool" property to "TextTemplatingFileGenerator" using the property pad, then whenever you save it, MD will run the generator on the file.
