T4 pro editors (payable) comparison

Question

I'm interested in purchasing a full features T4 editor. I'm looking at:

• Tangible T4 Editor Professional
• Clarius Visual T4 Editor Professional

They both have the same price tag (100$).

Clarius' product seems a bit more feature rich, but is it really? And if it is, is it then more memory hungry as it's usual with rich Visual Studio plugins... What about Visual Studio support?

Additional player in this field

There's also Devart's T4 editor available since summer 2011 and it's free and support syntax highlighting as well as intellisense.

Answer 1

I used the trial editions of both products for quite a while. The primary feature you gain in the professional edition of either product is IntelliSense. ( Tangible's free version does give some basic IntelliSense for a small subset of core assemblies, but I did not find it very useful in writing my own templates. ) I realize there's a few other differences between the 2 different pro-versions, but to me, they aren't that important. Have a quick look at them, and if they don't standout to you either, then it's probably not that critical.

As the key difference is IntelliSense, I would still suggest that you start with a quick trial of both versions. They have surprisingly different "feels" about them, so you will likely gravitate toward one or the other. (If it helps, think ReSharper vs CodeRush)

Personally, I found Tangible's to have slightly more features along with more samples, etc. ( Tangible also has things like UML diagrams, etc, but I didn't care much about that. ) However, in the end, I found Clarius's Editor to be more natural and comfortable for me (quite possibly because I used it first, several months before I found Tangible's)

Once you find you preference, then decide if you want IntelliSense and pay for the upgrade. ( It's worth it if you find yourself doing much with T4 ).

As a small side note, the advanced debugging features of Clarius in the pro-edition have been pretty useful on a couple occasions, too. But overall, the "feel" of one product over the other is a much more important factor in making a decision.

Answer 2

Chris already said a lot truth. I only want to add one thing: I think that clarius does still not color-code output code. While tangible does color coding for output languages also.

I find it very useful to see both the T4 C# code and the output code to be colored. Tangible supports coloring for a large variety of languages C#, VB, xaml, xml, css, sql php, etc...