Visual Studio Solution Template - Link Source Control Projects

My team is creating some standard VS solution templates. We have a well-defined project structure, resources, etc. that we need to use every time we start a new project and this is开发者_开发知识库 the perfect solution. The basics work nicely.

However, as well as defining folder structure (etc.) it would be nice to be able to import a number of projects from VSS/TFS. We have a number of shared assemblies that will be used by all projects and it would be awesome to add a reference to these projects when creating a new project via our template. Can anyone tell me if this is possible and, if so, how it can be achieved?

I think there are 3 types of items you might want to templatize (is that a word?).

1. New Solution
2. New Project added to a solution
3. New item added to a project

I'm not sure whether its possible to add existing projects to the solution that is created when a project template is run. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms185308.aspx shows how to create multiple project templates. You may have to either manually add them to the solution or create a script that modifies the .sln file to do that part.

Adding an assembly reference to either a project or item template is easily doable. The project template is pretty simple since you just need to modify your .vstemplate file for the project template(s). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171405.aspx for reference.

Adding a new assembly reference when you add a new item from a template is a bit harder but can also be done. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms185290.aspx for more.

Have fun!