I recently rebuilt my system, something not unusual for developers. In my case it is at least once every quarter. There is even an industry buzzword for it, re-paving, and it is appropriate as you are in essence taking a work surface that has become potholed and rough, and laying a brand new surface (your OS and applications over top of it).

But in my case the real pain started after I was done. During setup I happened to install SQL Server 2005 first this time, before Visual Studio. Apparently as a result of this a number of strange things happened to Visual Studio's default settings. For one thing, my help collection defaulted to SQL Server, for another I never got the Visual Studio "What kind of developer are you dialog" during install.

But most frustrating of all was the anemic looking New Project Dialog box that now appeared. (Click on the image for a larger version. Notice that there are almost no options, especially as applies to where you want to save a project or if you want a solution created, or if you want to add the project to SourceSafe!!!

Auugghhh! I searched high and low in the various options dialogs and on the web. I found all kinds of information on creating custom templates and repairing damaged templates. But nothing that would indicate how to restore the now missing functionality for the New Project template. However while I was searching for this information I stumbled on to the blog entry on Eric Hammersley's blog, called Missing an item template in Visual Studio 2005? Try this... buried in the comments was an answer to my other mystery, why was my help being pre-filtered for SQL Server?

The comment suggested that you go to Tools | Import and Export Settings | Reset all settings.

Then select your preferred developer type. In my case I selected General Development Settings from the list and Oy! All was right in my world again!

I once again had a full fledged New Project Dialog!! And my help was restored to the correct standard collections!

Ah, life was again good! Here is a shot of the IMHO "good" New project dialog box, again click the image for a larger copy. As you can see it shows the options that were missing.

Some experimentation yielded the fact that the Visual Basic Developer settings generated the anemic dialog. I guess Microsoft thinks VB developers can't handle the real stuff? Anyway, I am back to where I wanted to be. I hope this helps someone else.

Cheers,

Robert Porter