I'm appealing to the wisdom of the crowd here, trying, in this case, to avoid the code less traveled.
I created a Visual Studio project template, but now find there are a couple of things I can/should add to it, and one or two things I need to modify.
What is the "received" way, or "preferred method" of doing this: modifying the existing template directly, or opening a project using the existing template, and then saving that template-based project, after modification, as a template, perhaps overwriting the previous one (if that's even possible/allowed by the VS "ecosystem")?
I copied the extracted contents of the zipped template from C:\Users\clayshan\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\folder_name\template_name.zip to another location.
Does it make the most sense to open that project, modify, and save as a template, or to simply create a new project from the existing template, and then save that "new and improved" project as a template?
RUNNING COMMENTARY
When I open the extracted template as a project, I get a warning, "Load of property 'RootNamespace' failed. The string for the root namespace must be a valid identifier." I don't know if this is to be expected in this scenario, or if I should be slightly scared.
Another funky (as in "gives me the fantods", not as in the Troglodyte song) thing is that a template won't compile, as it's got those placeholder namespace names.
I edited the existing, zipped, copied it over to the village where the VS templates live and...now when I go to start a new project, there are two identical-looking templates there: the old, and the new. The question is, which is which? It's kind of annoying having to open them to see...
The final (hopefully) weird thing about the process is that, even though I added a "Site ULR" property to the template, on creating a new project from the template, that assignment reverts to blank.