Visual Studio Templates That’ll Help You Build Apps Faster

Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his most recent post, which looks at Visual Studio templates.

Visual Studio templates are in the news developers can use including two recent articles in one of our favorite sources Visual Studio Magazine.

The whole purpose of templates is to save developers time in creating apps, so our first candidate for a template that can do that is Build Web Apps Without All That JavaScript.

In this Visual Studio Magazine tutorial, we learn: "You don't need to write tons of JavaScript code to create a JavaScript-friendly MVVM [Model–view–viewmodel] app."

Author Tomáš Herceg is the CEO and chief software architect at Riganti sro, a software development and consulting company based in the Czech Republic. He is also a Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Regional Director. Hercegg specializes in .NET and the Microsoft developer tools stack and created the DotVVM open source Web app framework.

"DotVVM is a new open source Web framework that we developed at Riganti sro," he explains. "In contrast to other popular frameworks, DotVVM is a client-side library and also a .NET library that helps with building MVVM Web apps without writing tons of JavaScript code. In most cases, you will only need to know C#, HTML and CSS."

DotVVM is available as a free extension for Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017 that adds project templates and IntelliSense. It can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Marketplace or from the DotVVM Web site.

The tutorial Herceg penned for Visual Studio Magazine shows how to create a new, multi-platform Web app targeting .NET Core using DotVVM. This open source tool gives you choices as Herceg explains:

When you install DotVVM for Visual Studio 2017, you can create a new DotVVM project by choosing from the following options:

• DotVVM Web Application (.NET Core) template creates a new project targeting .NET Core. This is used to create a multi-platform Web app with DotVVM.
• DotVVM Web Application (ASP.NET Core on .NET Framework) template creates a new project targeting .NET Framework 4.5.1, which uses the new ASP.NET Core libraries. This a popular combination because it allows you to use libraries that aren't currently supported in .NET Core.
• DotVVM Web Application (OWIN on .NET Framework) template creates a classic Web application project that uses .NET Framework 4.5.1 and OWIN. You can use this method to integrate DotVVM into existing MVC or Web Forms apps.
• If this is something that would speed up the projects you're working on, Herceg’s detailed tutorial with plenty of code samples will be a must read.

Rapid Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Creation

Also in the news recently is Windows Template Studio (WTS), the wizard-based coding engine for Windows 10 UWP apps, which gained momentum with a new point release.

Usually a 1.1 release wouldn't be a big deal but as Domingo points out, the new version of the WTS open source project on GitHub provides wizard improvements, including the addition of some code analysis, localization, renaming of pages and background tasks, and other template improvements.

Michael Crump, senior program manager in Microsoft's Azure division, along with Clint Rutkas, another Microsoft PM, created Windows Template Studio, a Visual Studio 2017 extension that can be used to build Universal Windows Platform projects using a wizards-based UI and targeting Windows 10 environments.

In a blog post announcing the latest version of WTS, Crump and Rutkas explain: "Windows Template Studio addresses a top community ask in our developer survey to make it easier and provide guidance to create new projects that target the Universal Windows Platform … We are taking our learnings from the code generation engine and the existing wizard to provide a strong foundation for our code generation and developer experience in Windows Template Studio."

According to the blog, here's what's new:

Improvements to the Wizard:

• Page Reordering
• The first page doesn’t have to be the Blank page
• Renaming of pages and background tasks
• Offline improvements
• Initial work for supporting localization
• Code analysis was added

Page updates:

• Grid page added
• Chart page added
• Media/Video page added
• Web View page has been enhanced

Feature updates:

• Store SDK Notifications added
• SettingStorage now has a binary save option (not just string based)

Template improvements:

• Navigation panel moved to UWP Community Toolkit
• Styling adjustments
• ResourceLoader performance improvement

There's more detail on this GitHub page.

Just Getting Started?

Creating Project and Item Templates provides a basic explanation of what you get with Visual Studio:

"A number of predefined project and item templates are installed when you install Visual Studio. The Visual Basic and Visual C# Windows Forms Application and Class Library templates that are available in the New Project dialog box are examples of project templates. Installed item templates are available in the Add New Item dialog box, and include items such as code files, XML files, HTML pages, and Style Sheets."

This brief Microsoft article explains that these templates provide a starting point for users to begin creating projects or expanding current projects. Microsoft provides background on Visual Studio Templates, covers the Contents of a Template, and includes Starter Kits.

Template rookies will find files needed for specific projects including:

• standard assembly references
• a set of default project properties
• compiler options

"In addition to the installed templates in the New Project and Add New Item dialog boxes," Microsoft points out, "you can author your own templates or download and use templates created by the community. For more information, see How to: Create Project Templates and How to: Create Item Templates."

So if you don’t find a template to your liking, you can sit down and create your own.

Posted by Lafe Low on 07/07/2017