Office templates not available in VS2012 with ‘converted’ project.

Some time ago I hit a somewhat strange issue where I opened one of our existing projects targeting Office 2010, .NET 4 Client in Visual Studio 2010 and moved this project forward to Visual Studio 2012. After the migration I did not see the Office templates in the Add New Item dialog in Visual Studio 2012.

When adding a ‘new item’ to the project it did not display the Office options to insert a Ribbon for instance:

OfficeTemplatesMissing1

When you create a -new- project, the Office Templates show up without issues:

OfficeTemplatesMissing2

What we see here is a minor issue in the migration code in Visual Studio 2012 and is relatively easy to solve by manually editing the .csproj project file.

What you need to do here to fix this minor issue is to go and look for the entry in the project file called AddItemTemplatesGuid. The migration code changed the AddItemTemplatesGuid property from

AddItemTemplatesGuid="{51063C3A-E220-4D12-8922-BDA915ACD783}”
TO
AddItemTemplatesGuid="{147FB6A7-F239-4523-AE65-B6A4E49B361F}”

Changing it back to the original value makes the Add Item dialog start showing Office category correctly again. So the right Guid should be: "{51063C3A-E220-4D12-8922-BDA915ACD783}”

You can easily check this by creating a small new AddIn project, open the project .csproj file in your editor and search for the AddItemTemplates Guid again. You will see that it is the “{51….” one as specified above. Even better, if you go back into your source control software (TFS or other source control option) environment and look at the value in your original file before migration.

So if you also encounter the fact that you don’t get the Office Templates when adding a New Item in your Office project, dive right in to your .csproj file and change the AddItemTemplatesGuid back to its original value the one that was there before migrating your code.

Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook

One book I’ve been reading lately was “Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook” available from the Packt Library written by Richard Banks also Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP.

Visual Studio 2012 in itself is big enough to publish a whole range of books on each of the project types it supports and also the IDE has so many features that could be covered in a book. This book did not do that, it especially relates to the new areas in Visual Studio 2012.

Despite the fact that I have been working with Visual Studio 2012, provided early feedback and work with the product on a daily base the book allowed me to find several gems in the product that I had not seen or did not use before.

The book covers a lot of new items in areas such as Windows 8 Store Applications, Web Development, .NET 4.5, Debugging, Async, C++ (yes, C++ is back, blow the dust of your old book sets!) and also Team Foundation Server 2012.

As I said earlier, each areas covered in the book could be, and I’m sure in fact will be covered by individual books and dive deep in the subject matter but that is not the goal for this book. Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook provides a quick overview of ‘What is new’ to not only the novice user but also more experienced users can benefit from discovering all these new features and enhancements as are provided by version 2012.

So if you are looking for a book that quickly runs you down with an overview of the new things in Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 this book could be a big help to you. Just read it from cover to cover, or select the items you need, learn about the updates and deep dive from there as you now know where to look for it.

Here is the official link to the book with the complete Table of Contents, the sample chapter 6 “Asynchrony in .NET” and references to where you can buy it:

http://www.packtpub.com/visual-studio-2012-cookbook

If you also read it let me know what -you- thought of the it, what you liked and what you would like to see improved. The best way to learn is by working and discussing it with others!

SDN+(plus) Event in Arnhem

SDE%20Banner%20december%202012

Tomorrow morning at our annual December event, December 3rd we are having our ‘extended’ Dutch Software Development Network event in the real Olympic sportcomplex Papendal next to Arnhem, NL.

With speakers like Rockford Lhotka, Shawn Wildermuth, Dick Moffat, Marco Cantù, Brian Long and Cary Jensen we managed to get an excellent choice of speakers from all over the place but obviously there are also the Dutch presenters added to that making it all complete with sessions, dinner, networking from 10AM to 9PM!

For a complete overview of all our sessions have a look and check it out on http://www.sdn.nl/SDN/SDNEvent/Events2012/SDE3december2012/tabid/217/Default.aspx

You can still join us if you like and we’ll see you tomorrow to actually learn some new technologies or meet new developer peers!