Export template fails

I am not having any success running the export template command. I get one of two different failures. The first problem is that the command will be disabled. The second problem is that the wizard that appears does not show any project to export and hence the buttons at the bottom of the wizard dialog are always disabled.

I am trying to created a template based on an MFC DLL project on a 64-bit machine running Windows XP 64-bit Edition. I am using the RTM version of 2005. What gives I have also tried this on a 32-bit machine but have never gotten past the disabled command.

The help walk-through only talks about C# or VB .NET but surely this should work for VC++ too. Otherwise, why would the file/new/project/MFC dialog have a "My Templates" section

Has anyone else managed to created a c++ project template


Answer this question

Export template fails

  • mightymoe

    > By the way, why skip C++ Does Microsoft have something against (Visual) C++ programmers

    The reason that this feature does not work for C++ is more technical than anything else. It's really not about having something against C++ developers :) My whole team caters for no-one but C++ developers (I work on the Visual C++ team).

    If you're interested in the details: VB and C# handle projects in a way that's very different from how C++ handles projects. Due to the difference in implementation, getting VB and C# supported with templates was a much simpler task. The C++ team initially tried to scope the work required to get templates supported for C++ projects as well but after the investigation was concluded, we decided that C++ developers would like it more if we concentrated all the effort that was going to be spent on this in making IntelliSense and browsing more stable. The trade-off really boiled down to that. I hope you'll agree that we made the right trade-off when you see the improved IntelliSense and the live browsing (no BSC) features of VS2005.

    Thanks.



  • NeilQiu

    Hi R.D, the reason that you are not seeing the 'export template' menu item enabled for C++ projects is because in Visual Studio 2005 this feature is only supported for CSharp, VB and JSharp. The export template feature uses the new vstemplate format that was introduced in Whidbey.

    We hope to add support for C++ for future releases. In the meantime, you can still create templates for C++ using the old vsdir method. You can find more information about this method here http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp url=/library/en-us/vsent7/html/vxwlkWalkthroughCreatingNewEnterpriseTemplate.asp


    Thanks,
    Prasadi de Silva

  • Charles Salfity

    Walk throughs can be great but the one you linked to seems to be totally over-complicated. Do I really have to create a policy file to create a simple MFC project template Or is that simply part of a walk through that has me creating a distributed application and web service There seems to be way too many trees in that forest.

    Is creating a template so complicated that in lieu of documenting a set of simple steps users are left to wade through that walk through trying to figure out what is needed and what is not is needed for a specific case That's hardly what I would call "documenation".

    What ever happened to the nice simple Visual Studio 6.0 wizard wizard that simply let me point to an existing project that got encapsulated in one fell swoop With Visual Studio 6.0, it took me all of about 10 minutes to have my wizard tossing out projects tailored to our organization. This appears to be a case of one step forward, 100 steps back!

    By the way, why skip C++ Does Microsoft have something against (Visual) C++ programmers


  • Export template fails