How to add WCF templates to Visual Studio Express?

Question

I am working through the book Learning WCF by Michele Bustamante, and trying to do it using Visual Studio C# Express 2008. The instructions say to use WCF project and item templates, which are not included with VS C# Express. There are templates for these types included with Visual Studio Web Developer Express, and I've tried to copy them over into the right directories for VS C# Express to find, but the IDE doesn't find them. Is there some registration process? Or config file somewhere?

Answer 1

If you have both Visual Web Developer (VWD) 2008 and Visual C# (VC#) 2008 installed you can copy templates between them. The VWD template files live in (by default):

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VWDExpress

The VC# templates live in:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VCSExpress

Simply copy the templates between the two directories, they might not match exactly but they should be close enough to make sense, for instance I copied the project templates from VC# into VWD by copying files from:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VCSExpress\ProjectTemplates\1033

into:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VWDExpress\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Windows\1033

The templates won't appear straight away in the template browser. For VWD you need to run:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VWDExpress.exe /installvstemplates

For VC# you run:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VCSExpress.exe /installvstemplates

Answer 2

If you are a student you could get the full Visual Studio 2008 from DreamSpark for free.

Answer 3

Mike,

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express will help you in working with WCF Projects.

I have the following...

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Version 9.0.30729.1 SP Microsoft .NET Framework Version 3.5 SP1

Hope this helps.

Sanjeev

Answer 4

As a be aware follow-up, I also had to run

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VWDExpress.exe /ResetSettings

After copying the templates and running the

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VWDExpress.exe /installvstemplats

The IDE was crashing when it tried to enumerate the C# project templates tree. After running the ResetSettings, the tree iterated and the new templates were present.