This week’s SAS tip is from the fabulous Chris Hemedinger and his latest book Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET. Many of you are already familiar with Chris—whether you read his blog The SAS Dummy, hear him speak at conferences, or use his very helpful books. After taking a look at this week’s featured free book excerpt, head over to Chris’ author page to learn even more about him and his work.

The following excerpt is from SAS Press author Chris Hemedinger’s book “Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET” Copyright © 2012, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, North Carolina, USA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (please note that results may vary depending on your version of SAS software).

Getting the Project Templates for Microsoft Visual Studio

SAS provides the project templates. A project template helps you create the shell of your custom task quickly and without having to deal with the mechanics of creating a new project, setting the necessary properties, and adding all of the files that you’ll need. With a template, you can bootstrap the beginning of your project. That way, you’ll be free to jump right into creating your content.

You can download the project templates from support.sas.com. You can directly navigate to the template files by clicking this direct link:

http://go.sas.com/customtasksapi

From this page, you’ll find different sets of templates depending on these factors:

• Which version of SAS Enterprise Guide are you using? The templates for a SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 project (Microsoft Visual Studio 2003) are different from the templates for a SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, 4.3, or 5.1 project (Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or 2010).
• What is your preferred programming language? There are different templates that support C# versus Visual Basic .NET.

All of the templates are easy to install. You simply copy the template packages into the folder on your PC where Microsoft Visual Studio is installed. Each template package from SAS includes the documentation that describes exactly how to install them.

Technology doesn't stand still! Since the time that Chris' book was published, new software versions have been released – from both SAS and Microsoft.  The good news is that Chris used his crystal ball to foresee this when writing the book, took steps to keep the book material completely relevant and useful.  Read more from Chris about how the book and project templates still work with the latest versions.