Troubleshoot "Project Creation Failed" in Visual Studio 2008

Posted Wed, 12/08/2009 - 09:07 by Itsu Tamam
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Installing external VS add-ons may be risky - it may break Visual Studio and make it unusable.

 

It happened to me twice: my VS 2008 was broke in a way that I was unable to create new projects, or even new classes. I would think a simple solution is easy to find, but I found myself reading recommendations for hand-fixing the Windows registry.

 

The problem I had was related to TemplateWizardInterface, which was added when I installed the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX). Installing new add-on re-create the problem. So, here's a real easy solution:

  1. Close Visual Studio
  2. Open the file C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config in a text editor (notepad, notepad++, notepad 2, etc.)
  3. Search for the string "Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface".
  4. Comment out the whole dependentAssembly element that contains it. Now it should like like this:

      <!--dependentAssembly>

        <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />

        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-8.9.9.9" newVersion="9.0.0.0" />

      </dependentAssembly-->

 

Thats it.