Jeremy Bostron's Blog

Project Item Templates and Project Templates

jerbos — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 20:23:00 GMT

The last few days I have been playing around with a new Visual Studio 2005 feature called Project Item Templates and Project Templates found in Beta 1. Essentially it is a very cool way to create code and then have it show up inside of Visual Studio dialogs. For example, a “Project Item Template” shows up in the “Add New Item” dialog when you select the “Project” menu and choose “Add New Item”. A “Project Template” shows up in the “New Project” dialog when you select the “File” menu and choose “New Project”.

What is very cool is these templates are easily created and plugged into Visual Studio. Below is a basic way to get started with an Project Item Template.

Create a class file (test.cs).
Create a file with a .vstemplate extension (testTemplate.vstemplate). This is basically the file that contains XML that the designer can read to understand how it should display your template. See code sample below..
Add the test.cs and the testTemplate.vstemplate to a compressed folder (testTemplate.zip).
Add the testTemplate.zip to the appropriate ItemTemplate folder found in your “My Documents“ folder. For example, since I did this in Csharp I placed the file in:
My Documents\Visual Studio\ItemTemplates\Visual C#
If you have the Visual Studio open when you pasted in the .zip file you will need to exit Visual Studio. Restart Visual Studio, open your project and select the “Project” menu and choose “Add New Item”. Scroll the Add New Item dialog to the bottom and you will see a section called “My Templates“ and the custom item template you created should be found there.

Additionally, if you want the template to show up in the “Add New Item“ dialog with all the standard templates and not in the My Templates section, you can add the .zip file to the following location:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\1033

When performing this last step and placing the template with all the standard items it is important after you past the .zip file to the path above, you will need to run “devenv /setup“ from a command prompt, with Visual Studio not open. This is a bug in beta 1 that is being worked on.

I would love to hear any feedback that you have about this feature. Below is the sample code for the .vstemplate file that I discussed. For more information you can check out the online docs.
-Jeremy

<VSTemplate Type="Item" Version="1.1.1">
<TemplateData>
    <Name>
      <String>Testing an Item Template</String>
    </Name>
    <Description>
        <String>A test of an item template</String>
    </Description>
    <Icon>
        <FilePath>Litening.ico</FilePath>
    </Icon>
    <ProjectType>
      <Languages>
          <Language>CSharp</Language>
      </Languages>
    </ProjectType>
    <DefaultName>Test.cs</DefaultName>
</TemplateData>
<TemplateContent>
    <ProjectItem>
      <SourceFile>Test.cs</SourceFile>
    </ProjectItem>
</TemplateContent>
</VSTemplate>

Microsoft Employee Biographies

jerbos — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 23:35:00 GMT

Are you interested in who the employees at Microsoft are that work around the products you are interested in? I have been working with a number of individuals to launch the Microsoft Employee Biographies site at:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/bios/default.mspx

I hope this is something that is helpful to you and I would enjoy hearing any feedback that you have.
-Jeremy

Your picture at Microsoft???

jerbos — Mon, 17 May 2004 19:36:00 GMT

Chad Royal recently blogged about developers sending him a information and a picture to put up on the hallway. This will help the team as a constant reminder of the great people that are using Visual Studio. This seems like a cool way to let Visual Studio know who you are:

http://blogs.msdn.com/chadroyal/archive/2004/05/14/132307.aspx

Visual Studio Team Biographies

jerbos — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 19:35:00 GMT

For some time now I have been working on idea on how Microsoft can be more open with our customers in the community. One of the ideas that I have recently worked on was to show who is behind some of the work on Visual Studio. My hope is that there may be some benefit to those in the community if they could find a Microsoft employee who works on technologies that they are interested in. For instance, I thought it might be cool to list out the area of a product that a particular Microsoft employee works on and then have links to their blog or web site if they have one. This morning, the project to do this became a real and can be found on the Visual Studio Developer Center:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/team/bios/

I would be interested to hear any feedback or ideas on if you find biographies to be valuable or not? Also, if you would like to see this done more broadly across Microsoft teams?

Time with the MVP's

jerbos — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 17:58:00 GMT

This past week the Microsoft MVP Summit was held and had the opportunity to talk to several MVP's about community. Particularly, during lunch one day we had a Microsoft Community table that filled up and there was not a seat available. There were some great conversations and many things talked about how Microsoft can help with community. I spoke with several MVP's about the idea of biographies that I posted on my blog back in January. I believe the overall feeling was that biographies of Microsoft Employees may be helpful to locate where people participated and what they work on, but it is a small part of the picture. I certainly agree with that statement and know there are many things that we can do. I do hope that projects like Channel9 may contribute to and add value to the community by showing what we do at Microsoft. All and all it was a great time and I cant wait for next years summit.

Channel 9 is live

jerbos — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 18:19:00 GMT

I am not sure how many of you have had a chance to go and check out Channel9 but it is a pretty cool look at things that are happening at Microsoft:
http://channel9.msdn.com

There are some great videos and wiki's that are now rolling. I am curious about how this can help developers in their everyday jobs???

Do you know Microsoft?

jerbos — Thu, 29 Jan 2004 00:43:00 GMT

I was wondering if you feel like you know Microsoft and how much of that matters? I hope this is not a strange question, but I think it does has some value so I decided to ask it. I don't know that it matters a lot about what technology you are using, but do you feel there is a Microsoft employee/expert behind that technology. If there is an employee, do you try to find articles and resources by that expert or are you unable to find a Microsoft face behind that product?

Microsoft France has an interesting site that contains biographies:
http://www.microsoft.com/france/education/contact/

This site seems pretty interesting. If you find the Microsoft face important, then I would be happy to hear from you and what you would like to see.

Cycling and Isolated Storage

jerbos — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 18:31:00 GMT

It seems like forever that I have wanted to create an application that I can use to track all the training rides I do while cycling. Although I don't race that much anymore, I still ride about every day and do various workouts. I figure that I will start building the app with Windows Forms and then possibly utilize a web service later on to share data with other people that I train with. One of the first things I wanted to do was to save various user settings between sessions of the application. Things like the size of the WinForm, last used file, etc. I did some research this morning and found some good API documentation and information on MSDN and a great tutorial at DevCity.Net. Within a short time I had a sample application up an running that saves an XML file into my windows profile local settings location on a Windows XP box:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\IsolatedStorage

This was so easy to do with the .NET Framework libraries and the tutorial from DevCity. I am on my way, at least for now....

Community Profiles

jerbos — Tue, 30 Dec 2003 00:40:00 GMT

Thanks for all the great comments on Communities and Developers. I was definately interested in the many of the items that were discussed and I thought I would maybe write about these over the next few days.

There was definitely some common thought about the importance of local events. Simon Stewart indicated in his feedback that regular meetings where were an important part of the community experience. Denny wrote about the needs to bring event broadcasts to local areas since getting across town is much easier then getting to some of the larger events that require travel. I would guess that most of you use the internet to find a group in your area or perhaps are using the Microsoft User Groups site. Some of you are probably even organizing these types of events and are looking for great speakers to come and talk.

How do you typically find these events? How would you like to be notified about events? Would a community profile help so events could be targeted to your interests? What profile information would be important for not only those looking to attend events, but also those looking to use the system to organize an event?

I guess it really comes down to the question of how much information would you share based on the value that could be returned. For example, if I indicated a geographical region in my profile I would expect to get notifications of events in my area if I provided it.

Community and Developers

jerbos — Fri, 26 Dec 2003 21:36:00 GMT

What is the ultimate community experience for developers? I am a program manager at Microsoft that works on helping developers find interesting ways to help the community and make developers more successful. This is an exciting opportunity to start a blog and I hope that I can find others who have similar interests in community.

I often wonder what a developer needs to be successful in this day and age. I believe (tell me if I am wrong...) that many of us struggle to find the programming answers that we need. It is not because the answers don't exist, although in some cases they don't, but there are so many great community resources to choose from. In some cases I think a developer can find themselves drowning in all the information trying to find the correct resource to help with a project.

What do developers need to be more successful with community? This is not about driving or forcing community, but how can it be better enabled. This is about the tips and tricks that developers use to find resources. For instance, web sites like the ASP.NET Web forums are great for finding Q&A questions. Other sites like MSDN are great for finding Product Documentation, SDK, Technical Articles and Videos like MSDNTV. There are a large number of great 3rd Party sites that also have some great information. This leads me to the big question, how do you find all the answers from various resources? How do you research and store that information for a later date?

I hope to hear from you about what you like and dislike about community and what you would like to see more of the community.