Now that I work at Microsoft, I'm using Visual Studio 2010 as my main editor. By default, an empty web page is created with an XHTML 1.0 doctype and it's pretty barebones. Since I'm focusing on HTML5 & JavaScript development, having to constantly update the page with references to the new HTML5 doctype, jQuery, Modernizr and all of the other tags I use for my pages was becoming a drag. 

Today, I noticed a blog post by Zander Martineau in which he added a lot of HTML5 goodness to the Coda IDE in the form of clips, which is the code snippet format supported by Coda. This got me inspired to find out how to do something similar in Visual Studio, so I pinged Damian Edwards of the Visual Studio team for advice. He pointed me to the following article which explained how to create <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tsyyf0yh.aspx">"Item Templates" in Visual Stuido</a>.


