Saturday 31 May 2014

VS2013.2 : One step forward, two steps back

We try to make it really easy to put together a new application by using the Export Template feature of VS2013 Pro.

Currently we have one template for all of our windows 8 apps, and another for our windows phone apps.

To start a new application, we use VS2013, and say File | New Project

Select our template and we’re off.  In that state we already have our view models, initialization and serialization frameworks, etc.  All of these are built from source files, and aren’t in a class library anywhere, and using templates makes it very quick to create a new independent branch.

We thought that with the advent of the new Universal Apps, we might be able to solve these problems once and for all, however, it isn’t working out like that.

The export template functionality is still there, but it doesn’t work.  You can export the shared project (but that doesn’t show up on the new project templates), and you can try to export either the WP or Windows Store projects, but they fail throwing an error about bad characters in the path.

So, from what I can see, we’ve lost this great functionality.

It appears that you could code up a template by hand by hacking through what’s in the universal app templates, but I’m not sure I can be bothered to at this stage.

With any luck, I’ll find a solution, and post it back here.

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