A question in the MSDN VSX forum yesterday about fully customizing the solution creation (not the project creation) with a template made me to investigate to provide a long answer and I discovered something that I had totally forgotten: the old COM-based EnvDTE.IDTWizard that appeared in the first versions of Visual Studio .NET (2002/2003) and that can be used still today. That interface provides a single Execute method that allows you full control over the solution/project creation, on the contrary to the new wizard Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizard.IWizard that provides many methods to server as hooks in the project creation. Unfortunately I have had these two days very busy at the office and personal life (and the forecast for the next days doesn’t seem much better) so I haven’t had time to write articles with code about these wizards. Interestingly I have found that I wrote a long article with code for a Spanish magazine 8 years ago about the IDTWizard. Anyway, what I have done is to update the Visual Studio Extensibility section and Templates section to include both kinds of wizards.

Sayed Ibrahim tweeted me about TemplateBuilder (a NuGet package which can be used to easily create item and project templates for Visual Studio) and SideWaffle Template Pack (a Visual Studio extension that provides “The ultimate web developer template pack”) so I have added new sections for templates with download URLs and videos:

Download > Templates
https://www.visualstudioextensibility.com/downloads/templates/

Videos > Templates
https://www.visualstudioextensibility.com/videos/templates/