Item Templates in Visual Studio 2005
One of the first things I've checked in Beta 1 of VS 2005 was the way to customize its item templates.
I think this feature in general is one of the best productivity boosters around, and once implemented correctly can reduce development time remarkably. The reason most organizations don't use this feature is that in order to use it one would have to dive into complex ASCII files and obscure directories, without any reasonable debugging mechanism and sparse docs. There are some tools in the market for this purpose (such as my Merlin), but still - most developers don't use this feature.
When I looked in VS 2005 after this feature, I've got a surprise. Looks like the good guys at MS introduced a new mechanism which makes it more convenient to add / customize item templates. The new mechanism uses XML files (at last!) called vstemplates, which make the whole process a lot more human-readable. There are even already some articles about the new mechanism (like this and this). But, it looks like the job is not done yet. The new mechanism is applied only to the Winforms application. The web based projects still uses the (not so) good old vsdir & vsz files.
Does anybody know whether this will be the situation in the final product, or is it only in the Beta? Will the web guys enjoy the vstemplate file, or will they keep struggle with the older files?
If someone knows the answer - please drop me a line.