If you have been following the news around our 14.1 release a major focus this cycle was on developer productivity. In the current blog we are going to focus on the new Visual Studio Starter Kit Template Gallery.

The main idea behind the Infragistics template gallery is to provide easy to use project templates to developers.In the gallery you will find project templates mostly based on different on app samples for ASP.NET, WinForms and Ignite UI ASP.NET MVC. These templates are real world applications that can be easily adjusted to your needs. What motivated us to create such templates is that we want you to write less code and easily establish beautiful, functional, user friendly and fully-styled applications.

Among the current template you will find the ASP.NET Energy Dashboard sample,Ignite UI Healthcare PhoneGap app as well as WinForms samples such as Inventory Management, Project Manager and Outlook CRM. Over time we will create and add more templates to address a wide range of application scenarios.

What you need to know

The Infragistics template gallery is a beautifully designed visual studio extension and can be downloaded with the installer from our main page. When you run the platform installer you will find the tools listed at the end of the of the selectable products. Don’t forget to check the Visual Studio Template Gallery. Pay attention that this tool is supported only for Visual Studio 2012 and above.

After you have installed the Infragistics Template Gallery, you can find the tool in the File->New Project dialog of Visual Studio as a Project template under the Infragistics category.

The selection of this Infragistics template will open a wizard which contains all of our available project templates. As we mentioned in the beginning of the article, most of them are based on existing application samples. You simply click on one of the templates in order to download it and start a new project with it.

As I said you can choose a template for your ASP.NET, MVC or WinForms project. No matter which template you choose you should be on the alert that your NuGet package should be a recent version and you should have the Package restore in the Tools->Options->NuGet Package Manager enabled. If the options in the dialog are not checked – check them and restart your Visual Studio, so that the changes will be applied. That way you will have the missing NuGet packages automatically restored during build time.

In the Template Gallery wizard you can see that at the beginning all of the templates are online, but after you have chosen one of them it will be downloaded. You can find all of the downloaded templates listed in the File->New Project dialog of Visual Studio under the Infragistics category. That way when you want to use these templates again they will be more easily accessible. Another place where you can find the installed templates is in the Tools->Extensions and Updates dialog in Visual Studio. We will be publishing the project templates into the official Visual Studio gallery so if a new version of the template come out you will be notified and you can update it from either this dialog or our installer. As the templates can be downloaded separately from the wizard they can as well be updated separately. That means they are not tied to the release cycle and you can get new versions as soon as they are available.

Ignite UI ASP.NET MVC razor templates

To use any of the Ignite UI MVC razor template there are two requirements that you need to fulfill. First you need the Ignite UI product installed. You can download a free trial from our main page :  www.infragistics.com. The second thing is that you should ensure that the Infragistics.Web.Mvc assembly (DLL) reference is updated to the current version. If you want to update the version number, you should remove the assembly reference and re-add it from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). You should also set the Infragistics.Web.Mvc.dll property Copy Local to true in the project that you’ve created from the template.

Don’t worry if you haven’t done any of these steps and an error occurs when you run the project you will see a helpful guidance  notifying you of the possible issues.

ASP.NET template

The ASP.NET Energy Dashboard is a great example for a real-world application. The thing to watch out for here is whether the version of the the assemblies added in the templates differ from those that you downloaded with your package an error will occur. That can be easily fixed. In the installer platform at the tools section you can see the Version Utility tool. After you have it installed you just have to Upgrade the Infragistics version for your project. Another way to fix this problem is to change the version number manually. Go to the web.config file and find the assemblies  and controls tags and change the version of the Infragistics DLLs there to the correct one.

Summary

Having a ready to use templates saves time and allows you to create stunning application while writing less code.  In the new 14.1 release of Infragistics you can find a template gallery with different easy to use fully-styled application samples for ASP.NET, Ignite UI ASP.NET MVC as well as WinForms. This starter kit  gives you the opportunity to build real-world apps – so just add your content to the template and let the magic happen.

 

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