Creating project templates for Visual Studio 2013

There are a couple of project settings that I set for every native C++ Win32 project I want to start, basically, more aggressive optimizations for the release build.

Right now, messing around with my brand new Visual Studio 2013 – which I’m appreciating so far –, I discovered how to create a template project with all the settings I need, including subfolders and files. I found this article which explains the process for an ASP.NET MVC project, but the steps are the same for a C++ one.

The templates are exported as ordinary ZIP files, and importing existing ones is trivial, you just need to copy this ZIP file into the base directory. On my computer, this is the full path for the custom user templates:

C:\Users\Rodrigo\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Templates\ProjectTemplates

In addition to the project settings, I also put in the template a subdirectory called “src”, my very basic main.cpp file, which contains my wWinMain entry point. It seems that I’ll never have to write it again.