.NET Tips and Tricks

Blog archive

Organizing Visual Studio Project Templates

Visual Studio has lots of templates but you probably use only a few of them. Why not create your own area with all (and only) the templates you actually use?

It’s easy to do: First, shut down Visual Studio. Then, open Windows Explorer and surf to the folder that holds your templates. This folder can move around a lot. For Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition on my computer, it’s at C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Templates\ProjectTemplates. For Visual Studio 2012 and earlier, I’d recommend looking in the area of C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio<version>Common7\IDE. If you can’t find the folder, probably the simplest solution is just to do a search for the ProjectTemplates folder from Windows Explorer.

Once you’ve found the ProjectTemplates folder, add your own subfolder within it and copy the templates you want from the other subfolders into your new folder.

After you’re done with that, make sure your computer is plugged in, your battery charged, and open the Visual Studio command prompt. In the command prompt type:

devenv.com /installvstemplates

One caveat: For Visual Studio 2015, I also had to navigate down to Common7/IDE before entering the command. Now press Enter and wait.

Microsoft stresses that it’s critical that you let this command run to completion, which is why it’s a good idea to make sure you won’t run out of power part way through. When the command finishes (when the prompt reappears in the command window), open Visual Studio and go to your project list. You should find your new area with the templates you selected in the project templates list.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/07/2016


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

  • VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

    The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.

  • Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

    "Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."

  • Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

    Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.

  • Introduction to .NET Aspire

    Two Microsoft experts will present on the cloud-native application stack designed to simplify the development of distributed systems in .NET at the Visual Studio Live! developer conference coming to Las Vegas next month.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events