Clean windows 8 metro project

Last week I attended a Windows 8 session at MIC.  While everyone was working on the labs I was trying to set up my project structure for my own metro project.  When I created a new Windows 8 metro project it struck me that the project template is just a PIA to start a new project with. 

The project starts up with a whole lot of redundant imports of namespaces and you get a free “default viewmodel” of which I can see no real world usage.  And the best thing of all is that all the item templates hook into this horrible standard project template by providing test data which plugs into this default viewmodel…

I’ve cleaned up the standard project template by releasing resharper on it and doing a code cleanup.  The default viewmodel has also been removed… I don’t think anyone will feel a big loss there.  You can download the new windows 8 project template here.

To be able to use that project template you have to place it in your project templates folder.  You can find this folder by going into the options menu in Visual Studio. Under the ‘General’ settings located under ‘Project and Solutions’  you can find the ‘User project templates location’ setting.

A small caution is that most of the default item templates won't build when the default viewmodel is removed but I consider this a good thing as you’ll probably don’t want that code anyway ;-)