Create Reusable Project And Item Templates For Your Development Team

摘要

Over my years of working with clients on building Microsoft~®.NET Framework-based applications, I have often heard a common feature request for Visual Studio~®.NET: "It would be great if we could create our own project types and item types so that all developers in our organization would have access to them." Many orgs want to create shared templates for projects such as Web sites or for project items, such as a default Web page or forms. Visual Studio 2005 introduces a new model for defining templates and starter kits for projects and items that make this not only possible, but relatively simple. I'll take a look at how to consume, create, and customize these templates. In the past, users have been able to create project or item templates, but it took a lot of inside knowledge of arcane text file formats, JavaScript files, and folder naming conventions, as well as a little bit of magic, to make it work. With the new model, a user can create a simple ZIP file of the items to be included in the template and an XML metadata file that describes the template and its contents. This new model supports creating item templates such as a Web page, a C# or Visual Basic~® code file, or a configuration file. It also supports single-project templates like Web sites, class libraries, or smart client applications, as well as multiproject solutions. In fact, most of the built-in project and item templates that you use to create new solutions in Visual Studio 2005 are based on this same template mechanism.