Referencing an assembly in a T4 template

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 开发者_开发技巧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 Link:

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?

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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" #>

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You can also check here on SO: Can't reference an assembly in a T4 template

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@GarethJ gives a good answer but for all the methods of referencing an assembly from a T4 template try this: T4 Template error - Assembly Directive cannot locate referenced assembly in Visual Studio 2010 project.

And if you like the VS Macro solution then you can find 'em all here: Macros for Build Commands and Properties