How does the VS wizard work?

I’ve been trying to use the TemplateEngine Wizard to embed a dotnet templating template in a VSIX package. I know SideWaffle v2 does exactly that, but I want to understand how the wizard works instead of relying on a third-party tool. So far I have failed to get a template working without SideWaffle in VS2019. Here’s what I got from @sayedihashimi’s explanations:

• The nupkg that contains the template needs to be in the vsix.
• a pkgdef needs to be included with the following content to make the template discoverable for the wizard:

[$RootKey$\TemplateEngine\Templates\<something-unique>]
"InstalledPath"="$PackageFolder$"    // Path to the folder with the nupkg

• A .zip file with the template.json and .vstemplate needs to be in the vsix
• Set the following CustomParameters in the vstemplate file
  • $groupid$ to the group id specified in the template.json file
  • $language$ to the language as specified in the template.json under tags.language (or is this appended to groupid to get the identity?)
  • $uistyle$ to ‘none’
• Reference the wizard in the vstemplate file:

<WizardExtension>
  <Assembly>Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateEngine.Wizard, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a</Assembly>
  <FullClassName>Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateEngine.Wizard.TemplateEngineWizard</FullClassName>
</WizardExtension>

• In the vsix manifest, include the template folder as a ProjectTemplate asset and the pkgdef as a vspackage asset:

<Assets>
    <Asset Type="Microsoft.VisualStudio.VsPackage" d:Source="Project" d:ProjectName="%CurrentProject%" Path="|%CurrentProject%;PkgdefProjectOutputGroup|" />
    <Asset Type="Microsoft.VisualStudio.ProjectTemplate" Path="<path to folder that contains zip file (zip file can be in subfolder of this for VS nodes)>" />
</Assets>

Having taken all these steps, VS fails to create a project from the template when testing the VSIX. I shows an error dialog with the following message:

To create this project type, go to Tools | Options | Projects and
Solutions | .NET Core and check "Use preview versions of the
.NET Core SDK"

Which seems to indicate that maybe it can’t find the dotnet executable (even thought it’s in my PATH). I’m wondering if I’m missing anything or if anyone has a clue what’s wrong. VSIX built with SideWaffle v2 work just fine.

[Jjagg]

@phenning Sorry for the bump. How should the templating engine find and copy over the nupkg? It’s not getting copied over to the .templateengine folder.

[Jjagg]

@donJoseLuis Well I looked into this again to upload the project and gave it another go from scratch in the process and… It works! I don’t have a clue what I did wrong before or what I did differently this time, but I have it working right now 😃 I’ll reopen or open a new issue if I figure out what happened and it turns out to be a bug, but for now I’ll assume I did something wrong.