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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T01:02:12+00:00

I’m attempting to create a custom named attribute in my project template at the

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I’m attempting to create a custom named attribute in my project template at the XML level to store a boolean value, that I can use to track the success of some imports I’m doing in the project template file.

I’d like to be able to declare an attribute for the project template file like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" InitialTargets="TestImports" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <Attributes>
    <Attribute Name="ImportedProp" Value="False" />
  </Attributes>
  <Import Condition="Exists('..\SomeProj.props')" ImportedProp="true" Project="..\SomeProj.props" />
  <Target Name="TestImports">
  <Error Text="Unable to find Common Properties." Condition="'$(ImportedProp)' == true" />
  </Target>

The above method of declaring an Attribute is sadly not valid. Visual Studio doesn’t like it at all. It compile fine, but errors when you go to use the template to create a new project in Visual Studio.

So, I want to create an attribute name “ImportedProp” (e.g. Imported Properly) and be able to set it during the Import calls as being true if the import succeeded.

Then I can error out if the attribute “ImportedProp” is still false after all the import calls.

The problem is, as far as I can tell, there is no way to declare your own attributes solely in the XML of the vstemplate or csproj template. Does anyone know how to create a custom attribute for a Visual Studio 2010 template that I can use like I have suggested?

Declaring the attribute in the vstemplate or csproj template XML simply yields an error where Visual Studio says it doesn’t recognize the Attributes tag in the vstemplate or csproj XML file.

I normally wouldn’t bother someone about something that should be as simple as this, but either I’m blind, or typing the wrong keywords into Google, but I can’t find any solutions or examples of how to do this.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It turns out, there is another way to do this that will check for those imports. You can’t create a custom attribute, but you can create a value in your Project Properties (.props) or your project file like so.

    <PropertyGroup>
<SettableVal> *Value* </SettableVal>
</PropertyGroup>

    Then you can use it however you would like. Throughout the project file or template to control your imports, reference includes, or whatever.

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