In Visual Studio 2013, there were a handful of templates that supported developing ASP.NET projects with various frameworks and data structures.  Some of those project templates from the Visual Studio 2012 era have been removed from the Visual Studio 2015 install and added to the Visual Studio Extension gallery as the ASP.NET Project Templates extension for Visual Studio 2015.

This was primarily done for the following reasons:

• Reduce the number of templates that we ship in the box, thereby reducing the installer size.
• Update templates more frequently. For example, Facebook makes changes to their application development APIs that were incompatible with the MVC Facebook support.  To maintain support, we updated the template outside of a Visual Studio release.

What templates are included?

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Entities Project (.NET 4 and above)
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Linq Project (.NET 4)
• ASP.NET MVC Facebook Project (.NET 4.5 and above)
• ASP.NET Web Forms Project (.NET 4 only)
• Note: This template was using Universal Providers. Starting Visual Studio 2013, all templates including Web Forms were updated to use ASP.NET Identity and you can create these templates in VS 2015

What about other templates from VS 2013?

All the other templates from VS 2013 are still part of VS 2015.

You can create ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC 5, Web API 2, SPA, Azure Mobile Service projects, using the One ASP.NET dialog. This is the same as Visual Studio 2013.

How to install & create project?

• Install the ASP.NET Project Templates extension from the online gallery or by going to the Extensions dialog (Tools – Extensions & Updates) in Visual Studio and searching for “ASP.NET Project Templates”.

• Once you install the extension, the project templates will show up in the File – New Project – Web node as shown below.

You can now create a project as you normally would and use the template.

Summary

Web sites and technologies are evolving quickly. We want to be able to deliver to you project templates that use new technologies and techniques on a more timely basis, and to do this we have enabled the ASP.NET Project Template extension.  If you are looking to work with Facebook apps, Dynamic Data, or Web Forms with the Universal Providers, try out the extension and let us know what you think.