Creating a VSIX Project Template using Visual Studio 2013

If you are interested in creating an installable Project Template for your team members, you can accomplish this through creating a VSIX Project.  The major benefit of creating an installable Project Template is that you do not have to worry about instructing your development team members on where to place the project template files on their file system.

Before you can get started with creating project templates so that they can be packaged into a VSIX project, you will need to install the Visual Studio 2013 SDK which can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40758

Once you have done that, you can follow the instructions to export a project template here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xkh1wxd8.aspx

Finally, you can then proceed with packaging your Project Template by following the instructions in this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd885241.aspx

If you wish to construct a nested Project Template path for your VSIX project, you need to re-create the appropriate folder structure in your VSIX project (you need to emulate the same folder structure that Visual Studio uses as found in this path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates)

Then, when you install the VSIX package, it should appear in the structure you created as follows: