Sharing and importing Visual Studio Project and Item Templates

If you want to re-use and share Project and Item Templates in Visual Studio, then you will want to know how to create/export Visual Studio Project and Item Templates and then share them with others.

First up, in order to create/export Project and Item Templates, you must have installed the Visual Studio SDK.  When you are installing Visual Studio 2015, there is an option during the installation to include the Visual Studio SDK installation.

Once you have that installed, you will get the following option from your File menu:

Then, once the Project or Item Template has been exported, you need to share it with others!

First up, you need to determine where Visual Studio stores the Project and Item Templates by default.  This can be found under the Tools-->Options-->Projects and Solutions menu item:

You then simply drop the Project or Item Template into the root of these folders or into their respective category and you will then be able to create a new Project or Item based on this exported template!

NOTE:  One of the caveats of manually dropping these files into one of these Visual Studio folders is that if Visual Studio is already open, it will not pick it up until you shut down and re-start Visual Studio.