vstemplate - Developer IT

VSTemplate with build action

- by PhilHoy

How do you create a VSTemplate so that it automatically sets the build action as "content" not the default which is "none"?

Visual Studio Templates - adding additional pre-existing projects

Hey all, I'm working on a Visual Studio template where the generated project relies on a number of references, which happen to be other projects under source control. The question is how do I set this up in my ProjectGroup template? For example, if I have an already existing project at "C:\Stuff\MyUtilityProject\Utility.csproj" with a single file (Tools.cs) that I want to add to my template, how would I go about this? Here's what my vstempalte looks like. FYI - I am having no issues with the ProjectTemplateLink or creation of the Solution folder, just in adding the pre-existing Utility.csproj to my new solution: Thanks in advance! <VSTemplate Version="2.0.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vstemplate/2005" Type="ProjectGroup"> <TemplateData> <Name>MySampleSolution</Name> <Description>My Test Project</Description> <ProjectType>CSharp</ProjectType> <Icon>__TemplateIcon.ico</Icon> </TemplateData> <TemplateContent> <ProjectCollection> <SolutionFolder Name="Content"> <Project File="C:\Stuff\MyUtilityProject\Utility.csproj"> <ProjectItem>Tools.cs</ProjectItem> </Project> </SolutionFolder> <ProjectTemplateLink ProjectName="MyWorkingTemplate"> MyWorkingTemplate\MyTemplate.vstemplate </ProjectTemplateLink> </ProjectCollection> </TemplateContent> </VSTemplate>

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Visual Studio template not showing

- by David

Hi all I've followed this tutorial to try to add a template to Visual Studio: http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials/visual-studio-how-to-create-item-templates The template I have created is designed to add one predefined .aspx and one predefined .aspx.cs file to the project. The folder contains the following files: MoosePage.aspx MoosePage.aspx.cs MoosePage.vstemplate MoosePageItemTemplateIcon.ico The .vstemplate file looks like this: <VSTemplate Type="Item" Version="2.0.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vstemplate/2005"> <TemplateData> <Name>MoosePage</Name> <Description>MoosePage Template</Description> <DefaultName>NewMoosePage</DefaultName> <ProjectType>CSharp</ProjectType> <Icon>MoosePageItemTemplateIcon.ico</Icon> </TemplateData> <TemplateContent> <ProjectItem TargetFileName="$fileinputname$.aspx" ReplaceParameters="true"> MoosePage.aspx </ProjectItem> <ProjectItem TargetFileName="$fileinputname$.aspx.cs" ReplaceParameters="true"> MoosePage.aspx.cs </ProjectItem> </TemplateContent> </VSTemplate> I have zipped the files up (.zip not .zipx) and placed the zip folder in My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ItemTemplates\VisualWebDeveloper. I have restarted Visual Studio. When I go into my website project and choose Add New Item, I don't see my new template. Can anyone suggest what might have gone wrong? Thanks David

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Defaulting the HLSL Vertex and Pixel Shader Levels to Feature Level 9_1 in VS 2012

- by Michael B. McLaughlin

I love Visual Studio 2012. But this is not a post about that. This is a post about tweaking one particular parameter that I’ve found a bit annoying. Disclaimer: You will be modifying important MSBuild files. If you screw up you will break your build tools. And maybe your computer will catch fire. I’m not responsible. No warranties or guaranties of any sort. This info is provided “as is”. By default, if you add a new vertex shader or pixel shader item to a project, it will be set to build with shader profile 4.0_level_9_3. If you need 9_3 functionality, this is all well and good. But (especially for Windows Store apps) you really want to target the lowest shader profile possible so that your game will run on as many computers as possible. So it’s a good idea to default to 9_1. To do this you could add in new HLSL files via “Add->New Item->Visual C++->HLSL->______ Shader File (.hlsl)” and then edit the shader files’ properties to set them manually to use 9_1 via “Properties->HLSL Compiler->General->Shader Model”. This is fine unless you forget to do this once and then submit your game with 9_3 shaders instead of 9_1 shaders to the Windows Store or to some other game store. Then you’d wind up with either rejection or angry “this doesn’t work on my computer! ripoff!” messages. There’s another option though. In “Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\VC\HLSL\1033\VertexShader” (note the path might vary slightly for you if you are using a 32-bit system or have a non-ENU version of Visual Studio 2012) you will find a “VertexShader.vstemplate” file. If you open this file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad++), then inside the CustomParameters tag within the TemplateContent tag you should see a CustomParameter tag for the ShaderType, i.e.: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/> On a new line, we are going to add another CustomParameter tag to the CustomParameters tag. It will look like this: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/> such that we now have: <CustomParameters> <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/> <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/> </CustomParameters> You can then save the file (you will need to be an Administrator or have Administrator access). Back in the 1033 directory (or whatever the number is for your language), go into the “PixelShader” directory. Edit the “PixelShader.vstemplate” file and make the same change (note that this time $ShaderType$ is “Pixel” not “Vertex”; you shouldn’t be changing that line anyway, but if you were to just copy and replace the above four lines then you will wind up creating pixel shaders that the HLSL compiler would try to compile as vertex shaders, with all sort of weird errors as a result). Once you’ve added the $ShaderModel$ line to “PixelShader.vstemplate” and have saved it, everything should be done. Since Feature Level 9_1 and 9_3 don’t support any of the other shader types, those are set to default to their appropriate minimums already (Compute and Geometry are set to “4.0” and Domain and Hull are set to “5.0”, which are their respective minimums (though not all 4.0 cards support Compute shaders; they were an optional feature added with DirectX 10.1 and only became required for DirectX 11 hardware). In case you are wondering where these magic values come from, you can find them all in the “fxc.xml” file in the “\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.CPP\v4.0\V110\1033” directory (or whatever your language number is; 1033 is ENU and various other product languages have their own respective numbers (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964664.aspx ) such that Japanese is 1041 (for example), though for all I know MSBuild tasks might be 1033 for everyone). If, like me, you installed VS 2012 to a drive other than the C:\ drive, you will find the vstemplate files in the drive to which you installed VS 2012 (D:\ in my case) but you will find the fxc.xml file on the C:\ drive. You should not edit fxc.xml. You will almost definitely break things by doing that; it’s just something you can look through to see all the other options that the FXC task takes such that you could, if needed, add further CustomParameter tags if you wanted to default to other supported options. I haven’t tried any others though so I don’t have any advice on how to set them.

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Creating Item Templates as Visual Studio 2010 Extensions

- by maziar

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2010 Extension,T4 Template,VSIX,Item Template Wizard This blog post briefly introduces creation of an item template as a Visual studio 2010 extension. Problem specification Assume you are writing a Framework for data-oriented applications and you decide to include all your application messages in a SQL server database table. After creating the table, your create a class in your framework for getting messages with a string key specified. var message = FrameworkMessages.Get("ChangesSavedSuccess"); Everyone would say this code is so error prone, because message keys are not strong-typed, and might create errors in application that are not caught in tests. So we think of a way to make it strong-typed, i.e. create a class to use it like this: var message = Messages.ChangesSavedSuccess; in Messages class the code looks like this: public string ChangesSavedSuccess { get { return FrameworkMessages.Get("ChangesSavedSuccess"); } } And clearly, we are not going to create the Messages class manually; we need a class generator for it. Again assume that the application(s) that intend to use our framework, contain multiple sub-systems. So each sub-system need to have it’s own strong-typed message class that call FrameworkMessages.Get method. So we would like to make our code generator an Item Template so that each developer would easily add the item to his project and no other works would be necessary. Solution We create a T4 Text Template to generate our strong typed class from database. Then create a Visual Studio Item Template with this generator and publish it. What Are T4 Templates You might be already familiar with T4 templates. If it’s so, you can skip this section. T4 Text Template is a fine Visual Studio file type (.tt) that generates output text. This file is a mixture of text blocks and code logic (in C# or VB). For example, you can generate HTML files, C# classes, Resource files and etc with use of a T4 template. Syntax highlighting In Visual Studio 2010 a T4 Template by default will no be syntax highlighted and no auto-complete is supported for it. But there is a fine visual studio extension named ‘Visual T4’ which can be downloaded free from VisualStudioGallery. This tool offers IntelliSense, syntax coloring, validation, transformation preview and more for T4 templates. How Item Templates work in Visual Studio Visual studio extensions allow us to add some functionalities to visual studio. In our case we need to create a .vsix file that adds a template to visual studio item templates. Item templates are zip files containing the template file and a meta-data file with .vstemplate extension. This .vstemplate file is an XML file that provides some information about the template. A .vsix file also is a zip file (renamed to .vsix) that are open with visual studio extension installer. (Re-installing a vsix file requires that old one to be uninstalled from VS: Tools > Extension Manager.) Installing a vsix will need Visual Studio to be closed and re-opened to take effect. Visual studio extension installer will easily find the item template’s zip file and copy it to visual studio’s template items folder. You can find other visual studio templates in [<VS Install Path>\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates] and you can edit them; but be very careful with VS default templates. How Can I Create a VSIX file 1. Visual Studio SDK depending on your Visual Studio’s version, you need to download Microsoft Visual Studio SDK. Note that if you have VS 2010 SP1, you will need to download and install VS 2010 SP1 SDK; VS 2010 SDK will not be installed (unless you change registry value that indicated your service pack number). Here is the link for VS 2010 SP1 SDK. After downloading, Run it and follow the wizard to complete the installation. 2. Create the file you want to make it an Item Template Create a project (or use an existing one) and add you file, edit it to make it work fine. Back to our own problem, we need to create a T4 (.tt) template. VS-Prok: Add > New Item > General > Text Template Type a file name, ex. Message.tt, and press Add. Create the T4 template file (in this blog I do not intend to include T4 syntaxes so I just write down the code which is clear enough for you to understand) <#@ template debug="false" hostspecific="true" language="C#" #> <#@ output extension=".cs" #> <#@ Assembly Name="System.Data" #> <#@ Import Namespace="System.Data.SqlClient" #> <#@ Import Namespace="System.Text" #> <#@ Import Namespace="System.IO" #> <# var connectionString = "server=Maziar-PC; Database=MyDatabase; Integrated Security=True"; var systemName = "Sys1"; var builder = new StringBuilder(); using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString)) { connection.Open(); var command = connection.CreateCommand(); command.CommandText = string.Format("SELECT [Key] FROM [Message] WHERE System = '{0}'", systemName); var reader = command.ExecuteReader(); while (reader.Read()) { builder.AppendFormat(" public static string {0} {{ get {{ return FrameworkMessages.Get(\"{0}\"); }} }}\r\n", reader[0]); } } #> namespace <#= System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.CallContext.LogicalGetData("NamespaceHint") #> { public static class <#= Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(Host.TemplateFile) #> { <#= builder.ToString() #> } } As you can see the T4 template connects to a database, reads message keys and generates a class. Here is the output: namespace MyProject.MyFolder { public static class Messages { public static string ChangesSavedSuccess { get { return FrameworkMessages.Get("ChangesSavedSuccess"); } } public static string ErrorSavingChanges { get { return FrameworkMessages.Get("ErrorSavingChanges"); } } } } The output looks fine but there is one problem. The connectionString and systemName are hard coded. so how can I create an flexible item template? One of features of item templates in visual studio is that you can create a designer wizard for your item template, so I can get connection information and system name there. now lets go on creating the vsix file. 3. Create Template In visual studio click on File > Export Template a wizard will show up. if first step click on Item Template on in the combo box select the project that contains Messages.tt. click next. Select Messages.tt from list in second step. click next. In the third step, you should choose References. For this template, System and System.Data are needed so choose them. click next. write down template name, description, if you like add a .ico file as the icon file and also preview image. Uncheck automatically add the templare … . Copy the output location in clip board. click finish. 4. Create VSIX Project In VS, Click File > New > Project > Extensibility > VSIX Project Type a name, ex. FrameworkMessages, Location, etc. The project will include a .vsixmanifest file. Fill in fields like Author, Product Name, Description, etc. In Content section, click on Add Content. choose content type as Item Template. choose source as file. remember you have the template file address in clipboard? now paste it in front of file. click OK. 5. Build VSIX Project That’s it, build the project and go to output directory. You see a .vsix file. you can run it now. After restarting VS, if you click on a project > Add > New Item, you will see your item in list and you can add it. When you add this item to a project, if it has not references to System and System.Data they will be added. but the problem mentioned in step 2 is seen now. 6. Create Design Wizard for your Item Template Create a project i.e. Windows Application named ‘Framework.Messages.Design’, but better change its output type to Class Library. Add References to Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface and envdte Add a class Named MessagesDesigner in your project and Implement IWizard interface in it. This is what you should write: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizard; using EnvDTE; namespace Framework.Messages.Design { class MessageDesigner : IWizard { private bool CanAddProjectItem; public void RunStarted(object automationObject, Dictionary<string, string> replacementsDictionary, WizardRunKind runKind, object[] customParams) { // Prompt user for Connection String and System Name in a Windows form (ShowDialog) here // (try to provide good interface) // if user clicks on cancel of your windows form return; string connectionString = "connection;string"; // Set value from the form string systemName = "system;name"; // Set value from the form CanAddProjectItem = true; replacementsDictionary.Add("$connectionString$", connectionString); replacementsDictionary.Add("$systemName$", systemName); } public bool ShouldAddProjectItem(string filePath) { return CanAddProjectItem; } public void BeforeOpeningFile(ProjectItem projectItem) { } public void ProjectFinishedGenerating(Project project) { } public void ProjectItemFinishedGenerating(ProjectItem projectItem) { } public void RunFinished() { } } } before your code runs replacementsDictionary contains list of default template parameters. After that, two other parameters are added. Now build this project and copy the output assembly to [<VS Install Path>\Common7\IDE] folder. your designer is ready. The template that you had created is now added to your VSIX project. In windows explorer open your template zip file (extract it somewhere). open the .vstemplate file. first of all remove <ProjectItem SubType="Code" TargetFileName="$fileinputname$.cs" ReplaceParameters="true">Messages.cs</ProjectItem> because the .cs file is not to be intended to be a part of template and it will be generated. change value of ReplaceParameters for your .tt file to true to enable parameter replacement in this file. now right after </TemplateContent> end element, write this: <WizardExtension> <Assembly>Framework.Messages.Design</Assembly> <FullClassName>Framework.Messages.Design.MessageDesigner</FullClassName> </WizardExtension> one other thing that you should do is to edit your .tt file and remove your .cs file. Lines 8 and 9 of your .tt file should be: var connectionString = "$connectionString$"; var systemName = "$systemName$"; this parameters will be replaced when the item is added to a project. Save the contents to a zip file with same file name and replace the original file. now again build your VSIX project, uninstall your extension. close VS. now run .vsix file. open vs, add an item of type messages to your project, bingo, your wizard form will show up. fill the fields and click ok, values are replaced in .tt file added. that’s it. tried so hard to make this post brief, hope it was not so long… Cheers Maziar

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VS2010 - Add template to New Project window

- by gbogumil

I am trying to add a new project template for an often used pattern. Starting from the class library template I have done the following (it still does not show up in the new project window): opened the .vstemplate file changed name and description to 'hard coded' values (my template). The values in there pulled from the csharpui.dll resources. changed the TemplateID, DefaultName, and ProjectItems included. saved these to the ProjectemplatesCache folder and as a zip in the ProjectTemplates folder. restarted VS2010 and checked the new project location which should have shown my new template. specifically, the folders I saved to were.. C:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplatesCache\CSharp\Windows\1033\HostComm.zip (the zip is the folder name, not a zip file) and C:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Windows\1033 (this folder has a HostComm.zip file in it) Has anyone else done this? Can it be done? If it can then what did I miss?

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Any idea how to use CodeCampServer template?

- by Mendy

http://teamcity.codebetter.com/viewLog.html?buildId=11047&tab=artifacts&buildTypeId=bt21 CodeCampServer has two downloads type: VisualStudioTemplate and CodeCampServerPackage. I looked for any idea how to use them, but unfortunately I didn't found. So, I ask my questions here: How to use VisualStudioTemplate? the archive did not contain any .vstemplate file, so it cannot be used as VisualStudio template. Do I need to rename any $safesolutionname$ manually? It's not make any sense. What the porpuse of CodeCampServerPackage? This archive contains a deployment files only.

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