The Visual Studio tools for EPiServer on Visual Studio 2008
We have a product backlog item about making our Visual Studio tools for EPiServer CMS 5 support VS 2008. The goal is to provide the same functionality for developing EPiServer projects in VS 2008 as we support in VS 2005. In the mean time, what can be done to move into VS 2008 and still use at least some of the functionality of the VS tools for EPiServer that exist today? Well actually, there are a few tricks you can perform on your own to move the existing support into VS 2008.
Here's what you can do:
In order to get the project template wizard (the one that lets you create an EPiServer project) you simply copy the EPiServerProject.zip found in
"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\EPiServer"
to community template path for project templates found in
"%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#".
The Item templates (the ones that show up when you select add new in your project) can be copied from
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\EPiServer
into the community template path for item templates located in
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#.
After doing the copying you will find that the "New Project" dialog contains an "EPiServer Project 5.1.422.122" item.
... and after creating a project you can start adding items to your project and the "Add New Item" dialog will look something like this.
Next thing you want to do is to add the intellisense support for the web.config file. For this you need to copy EPiServer.xsd from
%ProgramFiles% Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas
to
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas
Now you'll have full intellisense when modifying the EPiServer specific parts of web.config.
To complete the environment we would like to populate the VS toolbox with the EPiServer web controls. However, this is a non trivial task that will require a windows installer package or possibly a VS package implementation to do so for this you will have to wait for our full VS 2008 support.
Now, it's time for you to explore what VS 2008, .NET3.5 and C# 3.0 can do for your EPiServer development!
27 February 2008