An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) supports device profile development tools that allow new device profiles to be created easily using predefined reusable profile templates together with profile configuration files that define the backend IDE services and industrial device bindings for the profile. Using this development platform, a single device profile template can be used as the basis for multiple different device profiles, each customized using a text-based profile configuration file. This can reduce the time and effort required to create device profiles for new devices, and can also reduce the storage space required for the device profile library.