Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility - Custom Project Template Wizard

Question

I've read a fair amount about the improvements of the extensibility story in VS2010 being much improved (i.e. MEF based, etc.), but have yet to get my hands dirty. I've recently ran across a real world scenario that's making me want to dive in, but I'm surprised to not find a lot of helpful info on getting up and running with what I want to build.

My team has created our own domain specific UI framework on Silverlight and we'd like to package up a series of Project and Item Templates to share as part of an SDK we ship with our product. Doing this in the traditional way by exporting something into a zip is pretty straightforward, but we'd like to have something more inline with the wizard you get in ASP.NET MVC or Silverlight when you create a new project (i.e. dialog/wizard jumps up and asks you for more info and generates additional projects, references, code, etc. based on your additional input).

Are these capabilities exposed through the extensibility model in VS2010? If anyone could point me in a general direction, I would appreciate it. Google isn't turning up anything for me today :(

Longwinded

Answer 1

I'm not sure if you have come across this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xkh1wxd8.aspx. It goes into detail on "How to: Create Project Templates" in VS 2010.

Buryat

This primarily talks about the static exporting approach, but three or four links off of this away was this: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms185301.aspx Which talks about IWizard and how to do something inline with what I'm thinking. Cool - thanks Jamie – Longwinded

Answer 2

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/VSExtnsnsTemplates2010.aspx

Bung

Answer 3

Some great walk-through on msdn => http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd885242.aspx

Manche

Answer 4

Quote from MSDN: How to: Use Wizards with Project Templates

How to: Use Wizards with Project Templates

Visual Studio provides the IWizard interface that, when implemented, enables you to run custom code when a user creates a project from a template.

Project template customization can be used to:

• Display custom UI that collects user input to parameterize the template.
• Add parameter values to use in the template.
• Add additional files to the template.
• Perform virtually any action allowed by the Visual Studio automation object model on a project.

Ancilla