Visual Studio 2010 IDE : Exporting Templates

Visual Studio 2010, as its predecessors since 2005, enables exporting projects and items templates. This feature is useful because you can generate skeletons for applications or single items that you can reuse in the future. This section covers both options, starting from project templates.

Exporting Project Templates

Imagine you often create WPF applications that need implementing menus. It would be interesting to have a project template that automatically implements basic menus so that you don’t need to rewrite a lot of code each time. Create a new WPF project with Visual Basic and name it as WpfMenuProject. When ready, type the following XAML code inside the Grid tags to implement basic menu functionalities:

<DockPanel LastChildFill="True" VerticalAlignment="Top">
    <Menu DockPanel.Dock="Top">

        <MenuItem Header="File" IsEnabled="True"
                  DockPanel.Dock="Top">

            <MenuItem Header="_Open" Name="Open"/>
            <Separator/>
            <MenuItem IsEnabled="True" Name="Save">
                <MenuItem.Header>_Save</MenuItem.Header>
            </MenuItem>
            <MenuItem IsEnabled="True" Name="Exit">
                <MenuItem.Header>_Exit</MenuItem.Header>
            </MenuItem>
            <Separator />
        </MenuItem>

        <MenuItem Header="Edit"
                  DockPanel.Dock="Top">
        </MenuItem>
    </Menu>
</DockPanel>

Before going on, save the project. When saved, select the File, Export Template command. The first choice is between the project and item template, as shown in Figure 1. Leave unchanged the selection on Project Template and then click Next.

Figure 1. Exporting a project template.

Visual Studio now asks you to enter some information on the new template, such as the name, the description, and optionally an icon image and a preview image. This information will be shown in the New Project dialog. Assign the WpfMenuProject name as the template name and provide a custom description; you can also add images but this is not mandatory. (Visual Studio will provide a default image for you.) Figure 2 shows how the dialog appears.

Figure 2. Setting information about the new template.

Projects templates are simply .zip packages containing the project skeleton and an information file named MyTemplate.vstemplate. By default, custom templates are exported to the %UserProfile%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\My Exported Templates folder, and by default they are automatically imported into the IDE (although you can decide to remove this option). When you click Finish, the new template is available in Visual Studio. You can check this out by selecting the File, New Project command. Figure 3 shows how the new template is available in the New Project dialog.

Figure 3. The New Project dialog includes the new template.

Now you can create a new project based on the custom template without the need of rewriting code that is already exposed by the template.

 

Exporting Item Templates

You can export single items, such as classes or controls, to item templates that you can later add to other projects. To provide an example, add a new class to the current project and name it as DisposableClass.vb. The goal of the example is to provide a template for classes implementing the IDisposable interface. When ready, simply implement the IDisposable interface in the new class so that Visual Studio will add required members. Now select again File, Export Template. In the first dialog of the wizard, select the Item Template option (as shown in Figure 4) and then click Next.

Figure 4. Setting the Item template option.

The next step is selecting the item you want to be exported as a reusable template. Notice that you can choose multiple items. Select the DisposableClass.vb item, as shown in Figure 5; then click Next.

Figure 5. Adding an item to the new template.

The next step is selecting required references so that when you add an item based on the new template Visual Studio will reference the necessary assemblies for you. Figure 6 shows how the dialog appears.

Figure 6. Specifying references for the new item template.

In this case the template requires nothing but default assemblies, so no references are required. The final step is where you provide information to the custom item template. Basically such information is the same as for project templates. Assign Template Name with DisposableClass, provide a description (see Figure 7 for details), and eventually provide icon and preview images. Finally click Finish.

Figure 7. Providing custom information to the new item template.

When the export process has been completed, the new template is available in Visual Studio. With a project open, right-click the project name and select Add New Item. When the export process has been completed, the new item template is available in Visual Studio 2010, as demonstrated by Figure 8, which represents the Add New Item dialog.

Figure 8. The Add New Item dialog shows the new item template.

With a few steps you can produce your custom project and item templates, which can help you by saving time when you repetitively create the same project types.