Skip to main content

Creating Visual Studio Templates

One of the really nice features of Visual Studio is the ability to very easily create projects templates from existing projects. This is a great feature to create a base project that contains some default functionality you always need.

One thing that you probably want to do with your templates however is change the namespace for source files. You can use a host of template parameters within your project’s text files to replace text when the template is created. The one that I use the most is SafeProjectName which looks like this:

   1:  namespace $safeprojectname$
   2:  {
   3:      public class Sample
   4:      {  
   5:      }
   6:  }

When the project is created SafeProjectName is turned into the actual project name with spaces and punctuation stripped which then effectively becomes the base namespace for your project. Once you’ve set up the template project the way you want it you can export it and this really is the easy part. Find the project in the Solution Tree and then go to File| Export Template:

image

You’ll be asked a couple of questions starting with the type of template to export – choose project:

image

and for the name of the template file and a description.

The description is what shows up in Visual Studio. I recommend you use a descriptive name in the filename because that’s what the project item will actually use:

image

Once you do this the template is exported to the location specified, which is just a holding location. The output from the template generation is a simple .Zip file which contains your project files plus a VS Content file that describes each of the items in the project.

Once installed the template can be used inside of Visual Studio. This puts the template into a generic project location so it shows up in the New Project dialog. The project only shows in the generic Visual C# project tree because that’s where the template was actually created. If you go to the Web project types you’ll find that the template doesn’t show up there unfortunately.

To get it to show up in the Web folder you can move the template from the default location to:

C:\Users\BaWu\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\Web

which puts it in the more predictable location.

Remark: It’s possible to call a custom wizard when running the template. But you have to install the wizard DLL in the following location: %programfiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...
Read more