VS2005 Project Templates Failing

I came across a problem recently where I went to create a standard Console Application project in Visual Studio 2005 and to my alarm I got a message saying

 

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Microsoft Visual Studio
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Could not find file 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplatesCache\CSharp\Windows\1033\ConsoleApplication.zip\ConsooleApplication.csproj'

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OK
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This took me back a bit, as creating a Console application is one of the most basic tasks you would ever want to do in Visual Studio 2005. my next thought (after trying exactly the same thing 5 or 6 times) was to run visual studio with elevated priviledges, but alas this still didn't fix the problem. I checked and sure enough I could still create a Windows application no problems (with or without elevating my priviledges), so I just put it down to some kind of vista weirdness and continued on (using Winforms apps instead of console apps whenever I wanted to create a quick test). Today, however, I discovered that I could no longer create Web Service Applications as they crashed with a very similar error, and with a presentation on setting up your development environment on Windows Vista looming, I decided that I had better get to the bottom of the problem.... and so I did.

 

It turned out to be the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Guidance Automation Extensions packages I recently installed that for some reason had done some damage to the Project Template System in Visual Studio. now I guess fair is fair, both of these packages are in beta, and there are some known issues around running them on Vista (unfortunately I was not aware of these issues at install time). One of the big issues with the Guidance Automation Extensions is around uninstalling it. You get so far, and then a dialog pops up, no title, no message, just an OK button, and it stops uninstalling. fortunately I found a blog post by one Greg Duncan on how to uninstall the Guidance Automation Extensions.

 

I can now happily create console and web service applications again, but more importantly stand up in front of the Victoria .Net SIG next tuesday and talk confidently about running Visual Studio 2005 on Vista.