About

MonoDevelop.Ide.Templates.VisualStudio is a library for parsing and creating new projects and items from Visual Studio templates:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6db0hwky.aspx

Usage

There are 2 possible operations this library can do:

Parsing Templates

Parsing templates is designed to be quick and lightweight, ideal for populating a "Add New Project/Item" dialog box. This only provides the included metadata about the template, and cannot be used to create a template.

// Parsing a Project template
var template_file = @"C:\MyTemplate.zip";
var template = VSProjectTemplate.Parse (template_file);

Console.WriteLine (template.Data.Name);
Console.WriteLine ("- " + template.Data.Description);

Creating new Projects/Items

Once a template has been chosen, it can be Loaded so a new project or item can be created from it.

// Creating an Item from a template
var template_file = @"C:\MyItemTemplate.zip";
var output_dir = @"C:\ItemOutput";
var template = VSItemTemplate.Load (template_file);

var parameters = template.CreateTemplateParameters ("4.0.0", "MyItem", "MyItem.Namespace");

template.Export (output_dir, parameters);