When I first started learning BIML, and compiling via BIDSHelper, I couldn’t believe how much magic was taking place. What absolutely crushed me though was that I couldn’t see any of the intermediate files, and debugging seemed very painful. I don’t yet have time to devote a good write-up to debugging, but I wanted to share a way to grab these intermediate files for yourself.
Personally, I wanted to see some of the magic that the BIML Engine was performing. And the power of T4 Templating is whole ball of wax itself - impressive. A forewarning for this little project - you won’t be able to make heads or tails of the random filenames, but they contain all of your Bimls (I will give some guidance on the filenames in a future post too).
Anyhow, if you’re ready to see the intermediate files, just clone my BimlWatcher repository and get to building. From the command line, all you should need to do is run
BimlWatcher.exe outputDirectory.
Then, any build you do (via BIDSHelper) will have it’s *.cs files captured and placed in your outputDirectory.