A few days ago I installed the VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up but yesterday I found a strange bug: when I wanted to create a "new web site" I had an empty dialog, with no project templates and all the field disabled.

emptynewwebsite

On the original post I found a comment from someone with the same problem and ScottGu told him to send him an email: I did the same, Scott answered in a few hours saying that someone will have handled the issue. A few hours later I got an email from Mikhail Arkhipov from Microsoft that pointed me to a post on the ASP.NET forum:

Apparently vs2008 cares for casing in the file paths. I have exported HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0 before applying the hot fix and after. It appears that the only difference between the two dumps (aside from some uninstall info) is that the latter has most of the file paths starting "c:\\" (lower case) when the former had those in upper case : "C:\\".

To anyone who's experiencing similar problem I'd suggest following steps for installing the hotfix:

  • Follow the steps provided with the hot fix release and install it

  • Open regedit and export HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0 to a .reg file

  • Open the .reg file with a text editor

  • Find-replace all "c:\\" to "C:\\", save.

  • Reapply the .reg file to the registry.

And now I can create websites again. Thank you Mikhail and Scott, and of course to Alex Kartavov for discovering the strange bug.

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