2016 Advanced User Track
TS9446: Project Templates - Making the Most of Code Reuse
Attached are the slides presented during the Advanced Users Track. I've also included the demonstration code in LabVIEW 2016 - I'll try to back save later this week and post an older version.
Hey Becky, I finally got a chance to watch your presentation (thanks mballa for recording). It was great! Here are a few points I would have made if I was there when it happened: 
- It sounded like people were interested in deploying project templates without using VIPM, and they were concerned about LV versioning. In addition to the [LabVIEW 20xx]\ProjectTemplates folder, you can also deploy project templates into the [LabVIEW Data]\ProjectTemplates folder. When you do this, any project template in that folder will be available in any LabVIEW version on the system (that is the same version or newer as the version used to save the template). This is a handy deployment technique if you're not using VIPM.
- The CategoryOverrides XML is only necessary if you want to override the order in which categories appear in the left-side list on the first page of the Create Project dialog. For example, we wanted Templates to appear above Sample Projects. Since that wouldn't otherwise happen with the (default) alphabetical sorting of the list, we needed to override the order. If you don't care about the order, then you would define the categories as normal with the <Filters> tag in the meta data XML, and you would not need to do anything with CategoryOverrides.
- In the presentation you observed that the images and localization folders in the Simple State Machine template source were not copied over. The reason that they weren't copied over is simply that they are not present in the Simple State Machine.lvproj source file. When the Create Project dialog makes a new copy of a source template, it only copies items that are actually in the .lvproj file. So you can put whatever support files you want in your source folder, and as long as they aren't listed in the template .lvproj, they won't be copied over.
- For more details on creating custom project templates, see here: Using Custom Templates and Sample Projects to Develop LabVIEW Projects.
Thanks Darren! I totally didn't know about #1 - that is a great idea for deployment. When I get a chance I'm going to go back and update the slides with these comments if it is ok with you. 
In your presentation we talked about dropping a VIT from the palette and we discovered that if you did that, you dropped the actual template, and not a new copy of it. I suggested making an XNode, but forgot about it until today when I actually needed it. So I posted my XNode over on LAVA.
