No templates in Visual Studio 2017

You need to install it by launching the installer.

Click the "Workload" tab* in the upper-left, then check top right ".NET-Desktop Development" and hit install. Note it may modify your installation size (bottom-right), and you can install other Workloads, but you must install ".NET-Desktop Development" at least.

*as seen in comments below, users were not able to achieve the equivalent using the "Individual Components" tab.

If you have installed .NET desktop development and still you can't see the templates, then VS is probably getting the templates from your custom templates folder and not installed.

To fix that, copy the installed templates folder to custom.

This is your "installed" folder

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates

This is your "custom" folder

C:\Users[your username]\Documents\Visual Studio\2017\Templates\ProjectTemplates

Typically this happens when you are at the office and you are running VS as an administrator and visual studio is confused how to merge both of them and if you notice they don't have the same folder structure and folder names.. One is CSHARP and the other C#....

I didn't have the same problem when I installed VS 2017 community edition at home though. This happened when I installed visual studio 2017 "enterprise" edition.