Visual Studio 2010 Make and Install Templates

Question

I am using F# and i found that the available templates were a bit to sparse for my liking, and i want to make more. How would i go about doing that? also, how would i install these templates after I've made them?

Answer 1

I haven't had much chance to play around with 2010, but here's the MSDN article for templates in 2008. Hopefully it is similar:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6db0hwky.aspx

Answer 2

If you figured this out I'd like to know. Normally this is the procedure I use

In Visual Studio's path you will find the default templates, these are a bunch of zip files that get expanded into the template cach.

They are stored in

• Item Templates - %VSInstallDir%\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\
• Project Templates - %VSInstallDir%\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\

Extracting the .ZIP in question and recompressing with the modified contents will update the template. You can also copy these files to one of the respective template folders in C:\Users\Brett Ryan\Documents\Visual Studio 2010.

For information on building templates have a look at Visual Studio Templates on MSDN.

You then need to tell VS to rebuild the cache.

1. Open a visual studio command line shell
2. Execute devenv /installvstemplates

For me the problem is during the rebuild setp, it does not seem to want to pass without giving me a good reason.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC>devenv /installvstemplates

Microsoft (R) Visual Studio Version 10.0.21006.1. Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.

The evaluation period for Visual Studio Trial ends in 144 days.

The operation could not be completed

If anyone has a workaround for VS 2010 I would be greatly appreciative.

You can also use the "Export Template..." wizard from the file menu, however the exported template loses original content such as if statements.

Answer 3

I'd try http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms185291.aspx - it seems like a good starting point, at least.