Friday, December 7, 2007

[VS2005] Project Template(s) Missing

Problem: All of a sudden you notice all or some of you Visual Studio 2005 Project Templates are missing.

Solution(s):

  1. run "devenv /InstallVSTemplates" from Visual Studio command prompt
  2. if the above didn't work, log out and log in as administrator then try again solution 1
  3. if all the above didn't help you , this will do it: Open Visual Studio, in the menu, Open Tools->Options->Projects and Solutions->General. At this point you will notice the path of Project Templates is set to "C:\Documents and Settings\[yourUserName]\My Documents\Visual Studio 8\Templates\ProjectTemplates" or something very similar to that. In order to fix it you gotta set that path to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\Project Templates or the same path according to wherever you installed Visual Studio.

This extremely annoying thing happened to me twice on different systems, and I think is somehow related to the installation of earlier Ajax.NET VS2005 extensions that somehow is messing everything up (bloody butchers). If you're able to spot Viz template directories, your first temptation would certainly be to copy all that zipped stuff over from the installation folders to the other Document and Settings path: just don't do that, it will solve nothing and you'll eventually end up losing all your templates. This 'cause the templates installation process involves more than just copying the stuff over to another directory. I was able to fix it using methods 1/2 on a system, but not on the other. Notice that with method 3 you are detaching Project Templates from your user account, but if it doesn't bother you and you don't know how or you just don't wanna bother messing with windows accounts, then this is your way to go.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

very nice of you. I'll keep the butchering on.

Anonymous said...

Man you just saved my friggin' life. Kudos

Anonymous said...

Thanks, you just saved me a great deal of aggravation.