Visual-studio – Visual Studio 2010 Make and Install Templates

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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?

Best Solution

In Visual Studio's path you will find the default templates, these are a set 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 %USERPROFILE%\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

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