Professional Visual Studio® 2008

10.2. Extending Templates

Building templates based on existing items and projects limits what you can do because it assumes that every project or scenario will require exactly the same items. Instead of creating multiple templates for each different scenario (for example, one that has a main form with a black background and another that has a main form with a white background), with a bit of user interaction you can accommodate multiple scenarios from a single template. Therefore, this section takes the project template created earlier and tweaks it so users can specify the background color for the main form. In addition, you'll build an installer for both the template and the wizard that you will create for the user interaction.

To add user interaction to a template, you need to implement the IWizard interface in a class library that is then signed and placed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) on the machine on which the template will be executed. For this reason, to deploy a template that uses a wizard you also need rights to deploy the wizard assembly to the GAC.

10.2.1. Template Project Setup

Before plunging in and implementing the IWizard interface, follow these steps to set up your solution so you have all the bits and pieces in the same location, which will make it easy to make changes, perform a build, and then run the installer:

1. Begin with the StarterProject solution that you created for the project template earlier in the chapter. Make sure that this solution builds ...