Don’t worry if you feel lost at any point.
#EXPORT VISUAL STUDIO MARKETPLACE HOW TO#
Note: The content that follows is not meant to be a tutorial on how to create multi-project templates. It is automatically generated from this source project using solution-snapshotter – the tool we’ll be introducing. Note: This particular project setup is available on the VS Marketplace. It shouldn’t be a big deal, right? Let’s check for ourselves. You would like to export the solution as a template so you can reuse the setup for other projects. Say you have the solution similar to the one we just saw and you have already set up various tools such as XUnit, EntityFramework, Swagger, StyleCop, authentication/authorization, etc. Through the rest of the article, we’ll go over the creation of such templates and the numerous caveats that appear during the process. The problem is that when you attempt to create one, things get unnecessarily complicated. Most modern projects adopt a multi-assembly approach, with solution structures often looking similar to this:Īnd folder structures looking similar to this: Visual Studio export works only for single assemblies that don’t reference anything else, but you’d rarely see a setup as simple as that. After doing that, you’ll have your project available as a template.
#EXPORT VISUAL STUDIO MARKETPLACE ZIP FILE#
zip file that you have to place inside the “ %USER%/Documents/Visual Studio/Templates/ProjectTemplates” folder. To create such a template, there’s an Export Template button under the Project menu (on the top) inside Visual Studio.
NET with Visual Studio and you find yourself setting up projects often, the logical solution would be to automate this process through a Visual Studio template.
This can potentially take up days until you get every tiny detail right. Have you ever found yourself setting up the same project structure, using the same framework, the same ORM, the same logging library – over and over again? Solution Snapshotter – Visual Studio tool Go straight to the repo to see it in action or read the rest of the article for a more detailed explanation on what problems does it solve and how you can use it. The generated template will be packaged in a Visual Studio extension for easy installation and distribution. It takes care of preserving your solution and folder structure, and also keeps any extra non-project files you may have such as configurations, ruleset files, etc. I wrote a tool to help you with that.Įnter solution-snapshotter – a tool that automatically exports a given solution as a Visual Studio template. There’s lots of tricky stuff you need to do in order for your template to have a decent physical and solution structure. Creating custom multi-project templates for Visual Studio is hard.