Organizing Visual Studio Project Templates
Visual Studio has lots of templates but you probably use only a few of them. Why not create your own area with all (and only) the templates you actually use?
It’s easy to do: First, shut down Visual Studio. Then, open Windows Explorer and surf to the folder that holds your templates. This folder can move around a lot. For Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition on my computer, it’s at C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Templates\ProjectTemplates. For Visual Studio 2012 and earlier, I’d recommend looking in the area of C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio<version>Common7\IDE. If you can’t find the folder, probably the simplest solution is just to do a search for the ProjectTemplates folder from Windows Explorer.
Once you’ve found the ProjectTemplates folder, add your own subfolder within it and copy the templates you want from the other subfolders into your new folder.
After you’re done with that, make sure your computer is plugged in, your battery charged, and open the Visual Studio command prompt. In the command prompt type:
devenv.com /installvstemplates
One caveat: For Visual Studio 2015, I also had to navigate down to Common7/IDE before entering the command. Now press Enter and wait.
Microsoft stresses that it’s critical that you let this command run to completion, which is why it’s a good idea to make sure you won’t run out of power part way through. When the command finishes (when the prompt reappears in the command window), open Visual Studio and go to your project list. You should find your new area with the templates you selected in the project templates list.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/07/2016