May
21
Written by:
Néstor Sánchez (EN)
Thursday, May 21, 2009 6:18 PM
Touching too many pieces at once almost always causes errors and that became evident when I began to see the error of this post’s title. My VS2008 install was missing the asp.net templates and I could not understand why -later on I realized it was because I had not selected a component during the original install-, and tried several suggestions like running devenv.exe /installvstemplates from the command prompt and resetting VS settings in the Import and Export Settings menu.
Long story short, those brought more problems. I just needed to add the component, but now the VS installer would not run. Avoiding a longer delay I attempted to work on an existing project, but then I could not load the Controls Toolbox without facing three more errors now related to SQL components. Running the SQL Repair halted mentioning a VS problem.
I was doomed. OK, I am being dramatic, but it was a drag!
I decided to re-install VS. And what do you know, I couldn’t run the installer. A forced unsinstall was required now. A short search and Aaron Stebner’s blog post came to the rescue.
After uninstalling VS, I re-installed it, ran SP1 and repaired SQL. I am safe again, so I thought I’d save someone else the effort of finding VS Product GUID and post the command to uninstall Visual Studio Team System 2008.
msiexec /x {80C06CCD-7D07-3DB6-86CD-B57B3F0614D8}
If you have a different version, you’ll need to find it. Just read Aaron’s post and follow the steps to get the msiinv tool and obtain a list of installed applications according to msi.
Note: this is not always what you need to do. It was my last resource, so use it when the re-installation of templates does not work, and causes Packages registration to go awry.