Can I use .NET 3.5 assembies in GAT text templates? I'd certainly like to use LINQ, but it appears that this isn't supported.

It's my understanding that thereexist two text templates engines -- one for the DSL Tools, one for GAX. According to the below post, using 3.5 assemblies is possibleusing the DSL tools text templating engine by changing the 'language' attribute in the template directive:

http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vsx/thread/cf66fd91-0b04-49a2-9116-a3e4eaa9b41a/

However, when I try to do the abovein GAT, I get thefollowing error:

An invalid language 'C#v3.5' was specified in the 'template' directive. The language must be either "C#" or "VB".

This seems to suggest that, unlike the DSL Text Templating engine, I cannot use .NET 3.5 (and probably 3.0) features. Is there workaround, or are there future plans to support using the latest version of .NET inside text templates? Thanks for your help.

Hi Clay,

I'm looking into this but I believe I already know what may be causing it. GAX uses a single code base to support both VS 2005 and VS 2008 and thus links to the DSL Engine version bundled with VS 2005 which should run ok over VS 2008. And this engine version (as it targeted VS 2005) doesn't support C#3.5 for sure.

I can think of a few quick workarounds that you can use to get going with templates using C#3.5, but I would like to confirm this first. I'll post again during today with more info and the workarounds.

thanks,
-vga.

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Thanks for your reply. One other thing came up that I suspect is related to how the VS2008 GAX toolkit is linked to the compiler.

It also appears I cannot use .NET 3.5 assemblies when creating custom actions. This is unfortunate because I can't use LINQ when working with XML.