Creating a Silverlight template for phone

Let’s say you want to share your wonderful Silverlight game design with others, how do you do that?  How do you create a template that others can use.

Let’s first describe what a template is: In Microsoft products this is a file or program that is open in a designer, Office products, or IDE that will open a new project and then set up the default save to another location than the original template.  I don’t know about you, but my favorite things is when a manager gives me a file and tells me it is a template, and it is just a normal file that I could utilize.  Templates are handy and allow you to control what the end-user experience is like.

So first create a simple Silverlight Windows Phone project (this will work for other projects as well.  Make a few changes to it.

Now use the menu File-Export Template, then you should see the following, don’t make any changes and click Next:

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In the next Wizard dialog, you seriously need to add the description and change the icon:

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I changed my Template Name from WindowsPhoneApplication1 to AAAAAABBBBB so that it would show up at the top:

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If you want to share the template, you need to share the zip file with others.

A template does not have the Solution (SLN) file nor the SUO file.

Give it a try, have fun.