Daniel Cazzulino's Blog

In other words, how to use T4 templates without ANY runtime dependencies? Yes, it is possible, and quite simple and elegant actually.

Sometimes, you just have a reusable helper that you bring in to every project (i.e. an argument validation thingy, or the static reflection stuff, useful extension methods, and so on). You don't always need them all, they are generally single-file utilities, and having a Common.dll looks overkill or dumb.

You might think this is a trivial thing, with Type.BaseType and Type.GetInterfaces already there. But there's catch: the GetInterfaces method will give you all the implemented interfaces by the concrete type, as well as all its base types, as well as all the interfaces inherited by other interfaces it implements. What a mess! To make it more clear, say you have the following types: