I need to reference a Type in one of the assemblies referenced by the project containing my Visual Studio T4 template. However, the referenced assembly is installed from a NuGet package. As that Nuget reference evolves, so will the path that NuGet places it in within my solution's packages folder. For example, suppose my NuGet package is:
Then the relative path to it from my project is:
If the prerelease is updated to beta, that path will change. When the package is released, the path will change. And every time the path changes, the assembly line in my *.tt file is out of date:
I don't think there's a way to accomplish this directly with the assembly directive; however, I'm open to some crazy ideas. Could I load the assembly myself into the current, or a subordinate or reflection-only AppDomain?
I think I could, but I'm not sure how to go about dynamically discovering the path to the referenced assembly in the project's references using T4 logic.
Any ideas?
I've found a solution using VSLangProject as suggested by this article: http://t4-editor.tangible-engineering.com/blog/add-references-to-visual-studio-project-from-t4-template.html
Given a string serviceContractReferenceAssembly a to identify the name of the reference assembly in my containing project, and serviceContractReferenceType to identify the type within that assembly, the following worked:
var templateItem = dte.Solution.FindProjectItem(this.Host.TemplateFile);
var project = templateItem.ContainingProject;
var vsProject = project.Object as VSLangProj.VSProject;
foreach(var referenceObj in vsProject.References)
{
var reference = (VSLangProj.Reference)referenceObj;
if(reference.Name != serviceContractReferenceAssembly) continue;
var serviceContractAssembly = Assembly.LoadFile(reference.Path);
var serviceContractType = serviceContractAssembly.GetType(serviceContractReferenceType);
// Do something with it here
}