We are trying to create a Xamarin Forms "boilerplate" for our company's enterprise Xamarin Forms applications. Each application that we have made requires the integration of our company's "common libraries" (security, theme, etc). We simply need to be able to create a new Xamarin Forms app that includes all of these libraries, NuGet packages and common pages/viewmodels/models.
One idea is to create a Visual Studio Template. Not sure if this is the "correct" way to do this because you only have the option of exporting one project in your solution (to a template). We would like to export our App, App.Android, App.iOS & App.UWP projects as a template. Even if we were able to export these projects (combined) as a template, would the GUIDs generated by Xamarin be "re-generated"? Would the App names be populated? Not sure...
Anyways, we have created a "boilerplate" Xamarin Forms app that we would like to export as a Visual Studio template. How do we create Xamarin Forms Visual Studio templates (how do you turn a Xamarin Forms solution into a custom template in the "Cross Platform App (Xamarin)" => "Blank/Master Detail/Our Custom Template" menu)? If there is a different way to accomplish similar ends, then we are happy to explore it!