Creating Visual Studio Templates

I spent most of yesterday creating a solution template for Visual Studio 2013 so our developers can begin a project with about an hour's worth of plumbing already done for them. It was an interesting task and one that gave me a lot of satisfaction having completed.  I like knowing that I've reduced developers' time for a 1 hour task to 5 minutes (more on why it's not less than that shortly).

First, there were a few links that proved invaluable:

• Creating Visual Studio templates
• How to create multi-project templates
• How to substitute parameters in a template
• Template parameters
• Visual Studio template schema reference

The process I followed consisted of creating a solution that I was going to use as a reference point. It had all the projects, folders, classes, dependencies, etc. set up. Then I exported each project as a template and went through each one making sure my parameter substitutions were in place. I then tested each individual project template to ensure they behaved as expected. Finally, I hand-rolled a multi-project template that tied them together.  That part was simple enough.

Where I started to hit a snag was that the multi-project template behavior creates a sub-folder for the first project and within that a sub-folder for each project (rather than having the project folders all created as peers of the *.sln file). There doesn't appear to be a way to change that behavior, which is unfortunate, because it prevents NuGet dependencies from working properly.  So while the template creates everything in a matter of seconds, the developer then has to close Visual Studio, relocate five folders to the correct location and edit the *.sln file.  That's why the template only saves 91.5% of a developers time rather than 99.8%.

Still pretty good, though.