How to: Enable Temporary Projects
Temporary projects are not always enabled in the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Use the steps in this topic to set up the IDE or configure your project templates to support temporary projects.
To work in the IDE, temporary projects have these two requirements:
The project template that you want to work on as a temporary project must support temporary projects. By default, all Visual Basic and Visual C# project templates support temporary projects.
In the Options dialog box, Save new projects when created must be cleared. In some included Visual Studio settings profiles, this option is selected by default. For more information about Visual Studio profile settings, see Visual Studio Settings.
Enabling Temporary Projects
If the project that you want to work with as a temporary project already supports temporary projects, you must change a setting in the Options dialog box to enable temporary projects.
To enable temporary projects in the IDE
On the Tools menu, click Options.
Expand the Projects and Solutions node, and select the General node.
Make sure Save new projects when created is cleared.
Click OK.
For more information about options in this dialog box, see General, Projects and Solutions, Options Dialog Box.
Customizing a Template to Support Temporary Projects
Templates are defined by a .vstemplate file inside a template .zip file. The metadata that is contained in the .vstemplate file determines whether a template will support temporary projects. For more information about templates, see Visual Studio Templates.
To configure project templates to support temporary projects
In the .vstemplate file of the project template, set PromptForSaveOnCreation to true.
Note
Some project types do not enable temporary projects, and modifications to the PromptForSaveOnCreation element will be ignored.
For more information, see How to: Update Existing Templates and PromptForSaveOnCreation Element (Visual Studio Templates).
See Also
Tasks
How to: Save Temporary Projects