Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Visual Studio 2005 Multi-Project Templates - a waste of time?

As part of my twelve-days-of-code, I'm tackling a set of small projects geared towards simple project automation. I've discovered in recent projects that although the road is always paved with good intentions, other tasks, emergencies and distractions always prevent you from accomplishing what seem to be the most minor tasks. So when starting out on a new task, we always cut corners with the intention of returning to these trivial tasks whenever we find the time, or when they become justified in our client's eyes. However, if we started out with these things done for us, no one would question their existence or worry about a catch-up penalty; we would just accept these things as best-practice.

Visual Studio Project templates are interesting, though my first encounters with them suggest they miss the mark. For my projects, I find the effort isn't about creating the project, it's about creating the overall solution: project libraries, web sites, test harnesses, references to third-party libaries and tools, build-scripts, etc. Visual Studio supports the concept of "Multi-Projects Templates", which are limited (see below), but I suspect that the Guidance Automation Extensions might fill in the gaps.

Visual Studio supports two types of templates within the IDE, and a third type which must be stitched together using XML. The first type refers to "Item Templates" which refer to single files which can be included in any project. I'm focusing more on Project templates and Multi-Project templates.

Within Visual Studio, the concept of a project template is extremely easy: you simply create the project the way you like and then choose the "Export Templates..." option from the File menu. The project and its contents are published as a ZIP file in "My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\My Exported Templates". A big plus on the template structure is that all the files support parameterization, which means you can decorate the exported files with keywords that are dynamically replaced when the template is created by the user. The export wizard takes care of most of the keyword substitution for you, such that root namespaces in all files will match the name of the user's solution. With this in mind, a Project Template is "sanitized" and waiting for your client to adopt your structure with their name.

Multi-Project Templates stitch multiple Project Templates together by using a master xml-based template file. These templates can't be created using the IDE, but you can create a solution and then export each project out as a Project Template, then following this handy MSDN article and the Template Schema reference, you can quickly parcel together a master template.

However, there's a few really nasty limitations with multi-item projects templates. The biggest issue is that the Project Name cannot be parameterized, so the template adopts the names that are defined in your configuration file. As a result, the only thing you can really customize is the name of the solution. I was completely baffled by this: I thought I must be doing something wrong. However, after a few minutes of googling, others had come to the exact same conclusion.

Fortunately, the template system supports a Wizard framework, which would allow you to write some code to dynamically modify the solution. Unfortunately, the code for this would have to be strong-named and installed in the GAC. I'm tempted to wade into this, but I fear that I might be better off looking at the Guidance Automation Toolkit.

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