Windows Forms Development template missing?

Question

Why do I not see any languages (C#, C++ etc) or the Windows Forms Development template(s) after completing the VS 2005 Professional or Express version(s) installation?

Answer 1

This issue can occur for a number of reasons, some of which include:

• The installation process may not have correctly copied the template files from the installation media. This can happen due to bad media.
• The installation failed in such a way that the templates are physically present but not registered properly within the Visual Studio environment.

Possible resolutions:

In a correctly functioning installation of Visual Studio 2005, the default templates are located in the following directories:

Project Templates (Class Library et al):

%VSInstallDir\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates

Item Templates (Class, Interface et al)

%VSInstallDir\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates
where %VSInstallDir% is the root of your Visual Studio installation

If these directories contain zip files resembling the template names then the templates are physically present on the machine and their absence within the Visual Studio environment is probably a registration issue.

You can re-register the default templates with Visual Studio by running the following command at an elevated command prompt:

devenv.exe /InstallVSTemplates

After running this command, the default templates should be re-registered and will appear in the New Project and New Item dialogs.

If the template files are not present in one or both of these locations or not all the default templates are present, you may have installed from a corrupt installation source (ie. badly burned media, bad download).

If this is the case you may want to consider re-installing Visual Studio from a known-good installation source.

Sources:

\InstallVSTemplates Command Line Switch (MSDN)