Visual Studio web project template for Zermatt… and your CardSpace RP ASP.NET web site is up&running in just 37.1 seconds

You would not believe how often I have to set up identity enabled web sites: for verifying a theory, for proving a point with colleagues, for demos and events… really really often. Vast majority of cases those are barely proofs of concept, nothing elaborated, so I’ve been working for reducing the overhead that every project entails.

Needless to say, Zermatt has been a miracle balm for this: instead of cut&paste reuse, I finally have a tool with most of the capabilities I need few intellisense steps away. However my laziness knows no boundaries, so I came out with something that’s even faster: a Visual Studio template for web sites, which sets up the few knobs that Zermatt needs directly at project creation time. Oh, don’t expect anything fancy: this is basically the RP project I walked you through few posts ago. The only difference is that instead of adding references, creating pages, dragging controls and working with the web.config the template itself takes care of that. I am providing the template as attachment to this post: you can just drop the ZIP it in C:Users<your user>DocumentsVisual Studio 2008TemplatesProjectTemplatesVisual Web Developer (or equivalent, if you use another disk/OS) and next time you’ll create a new web site with Visual Studio you’ll find it under “My Templates” as shown below.

Now. ALL possible disclaimers apply for this template, the web site produced is just an example and lacks A LOT of key capabilities that should instead be implemented in an RP; furthermore, it assumes that you’ll run the web site on the local IIS and that your SSL binding is using the selfsigned cert that gets installed with Zermatt’s samples.

That said: using templates r o c k s. If all you need is creating a PoC, you can have your base RP site up&running REAL fast. How fast? Well, I decided to verify beforehand how long it would take to go from nothing (visual studio not running, no virtual directories, nothing) to being signed in in a newly created CardSpace RP web site. I downloaded a stopwatch gadget, reduced the screen resolution, fired up Camtasia… and timed myself while creating the project & running it. The results are pretty staggering… 37.1 seconds at the first attempt! And I blabbered the entire time, didn’t optimize mouse paths, didn’t use a monstrously powerful machine… in other words, this is a record you can smash any time if you just try. If you are into exotic accents, or if you don’t believe me, you can see the above in action in the 3-minutes video below. Fun!