Content Installer package for Templates

Content Installer package for Templates

Old forum URL: forums.lhotka.net/forums/t/7199.aspx


uwillmore posted on Tuesday, June 30, 2009

I am trying to create a Content Installer package so that I can distrubute an installable .vsi file with my customized CSLA templates and I am having problems.

This is not the usual Export Template install, which installs one template at the time. I want templates that include our standard documentation header with parameters that will be replaced by the template generator when the CSLA template is selected from the Add -> New Item menu option. To do this I had to export every one of the templates and then modify the template to include my parameters. So I eventually ended up with a customized template and a .vstemplate file for each of the templates provided with CSLA. Using these files I then created the .vscontent file as described by Microsoft, zipped everything up and changed the .zip extension to the required .vsi extension. Now all I had to do was double click the .vsi file and the templates would be installed and avaiable from the Add-> New Item menu, according to Microsoft, but of course that's not what happened.Sad [:(]

Instead, I get a message that say: The .vscontent file contains no items to install.

When I searched Microsoft I found a site that showed an example .vscontent file and it used a .zip file for each of the template file groups, rather than using individual files. Each template had it's own .zip file containing the icon file, the template file and the .vstemplate file from the Export Template wizard. These zip files where then zipped into another zip file which was then renamed .vsi So I did the same thing, changed the vscontent file to reflect the new file names and tried again. I got the same message again and now I am stuck.

If you have any ideas about what I may be doing wrong, I sure would appreciate hearing from you. I have a .vsi file that should install just one of the customized templates that gives me the same message which I can email to anyone willing to help me with this.

FYI: I am using VS 2005 for now, but this will have to work for both VS2005 and VS2008 eventually.

Thanks a bunch for any help you can give me.

URW

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