Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Finding the Export Template menu item in Visual Studio

by bruce via Bruce Johnson's SOA(P) Box on 9/19/2006 8:18:00 PM

I’m in the process of doing some customization to support a new Team Systems project template and I needed to create a new manual test template. It seemed like it should be pretty simple, but I ran into a couple of issues that are blogworthy. I’ll focus on the one described in the title, but there are other posts coming.

The instructions that I read on how to create an item template were to create the code needed for the template in Visual Studio and then use the File | Export Template menu option. Like I said, sounds easy. Until you discover that there is no Export Template menu option.

The solution is to add the menu option to the File menu. To do this, from within Visual Studio start with Tools | Customize. On the Commands tab, there is a Rearrange Commands button. Click it and the Rearrange Commands dialog appears. Make sure the Menu Bar radio button is selected and the drop down immediately to the right is “File”. Then drag the Export Templates command (you’ll find it under the File category) from the Customize dialog to the list box area in Rearrange Commands. Close these two dialog boxes and you now have an Export Template menu option exactly where everyone seemed to think it already was.