Chapter 10: Deploying Custom Templates

Have you ever been tasked with creating a new application that is similar to one you previously created? What do you do in such situations? A common option is to locate that previous solution, copy/paste it, and then furiously search through it to change namespaces, remove obsolete code, and delete other project-specific configuration data.

This chapter is going to demonstrate an alternative approach, using an extremely powerful capability of Visual Studio—the deployment of custom templates. The prior two chapters on project and item templates have been building up to this point. Now that you understand project and item templates and have seen how to make your own, we are going to take things to a level beyond simple copying and refactoring an existing solution.

For context, in the last chapter, you learned how to use Visual Studio's built-in Export Template Wizard. This technique allowed us to easily create a .zip file containing...