Referencing an assembly in a T4 template

Question

It's been a while since I last used T4 and this is probably a silly question...

Is it possible to reference an arbitrary assembly from a template?

Example:

• I have a class that I'd like to use in Project X
• Project X.Test references X and contains the .tt file

I assume the following should work

<#@ assembly name="X" #>

But I get the following error on save:

Compiling transformation: Metadata file 'X' could not be found

What am I doing wrong?

(In case anyone's interested: I'm trying to automatically generate a particular type of tests based on some metadata that I get from X)

Update: it looks like VS2010 has broken the assembly resolution behavior that I was expecting. From http://blogs.msdn.com/b/garethj/archive/2010/04/15/what-s-new-in-t4-in-visual-studio-2010.aspx:

T4's assembly set is completely separated from the containing project's assembly set to avoid picking up the wrong assemblies when a project targets previous framework versions. Project assemblies are no longer used to resolve template assembly directives.

Are there any workarounds, besides using absolute paths?

Answer 1

You can use VS macro variables such as $(SolutionDir) in your reference as of VS2010 e.g.

<#@ assembly name="$(SolutionDir)\Project1\bin\debug\Foo.dll" #>