Stephen Rakonza

Visual Studio project templates and item templates are reusable and customizable stubs that can simplify the development process. They provide pre-defined starting points for the project or the project items, thus removing the need to create new projects and items from scratch every time. A Visual Studio template is represented by an icon, a name and a description in the New Project dialog or the Add New Item dialog. Behind the scene, each template is a compressed .zip file located in a special folder. Managing templates is as easy as managing files. Visual Studio 2005 installs a number of project templates and item templates to your computer by default. When creating a new project, a developer will have several categories of projects to choose from, as shown in Figure 1. For example, the more common Windows projects include Windows Application and Class Library. Th... (more)