SharpDevelop project templates

I wanted to create castle project template for SharpDevelop, I ran into a few issues, some I found a way to fix, some I didn’t.

One thing that I needed to do was add a project reference to a dll that was not in the GAC, to do this the HintPath attribute can be used on the Reference element.

    <Reference Include=“Castle.Core” HintPath=“c:\castlebin\Castle.Core.dll”/>

Secondly, I wanted to set the debug options to allow cassini debugging. I found a way to set these options but I didn’t find a way to dynamically insert the project name/dll into the command line options. In the PropertyGroup element you can add the following to set these options. Note the ${ProjectName} string is not replaced with the project name.

    <DebugOptions>
        <StartAction>Program</StartAction>
        <StartProgram>c:\program files\cassini\CassiniWebServer2.exe</StartProgram>
        <StartArguments>C:\Documents and Settings\Dusty\My Documents\SharpDevelop Projects\${ProjectName} 8080 “/${ProjectName}”</StartArguments>
    </DebugOptions>

So I guess there are still two main problems with this setup. First you have to know the path of any dll’s that are not installed in the GAC. And if you want to reference the project name in the debug options, it doesn’t look like there is a way to do that. But for setting up personal project templates these things may be useful.