Which is the most advantageous strategy for creating a tweaked Visual Studio Project Template?

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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.

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