So I just lost all of my project templates in Web projects. I've been working on a small utility page on my site that generates help documentation on the fly. I've been working happily along on this site when all of a sudden when I needed to add a config file to control debugging and authentication on this page/app.

could not find a part of the path 'C:\programs\vs2008\ Common 7\IDE\ItemTemplatesCache\Web\CSharp\1033\webConfig.zip\webConfig.vstemplate'.

A quick check in the above path oddly shows that the webConfig.zip file exists in this location and the content of the file is fine as well. Trying to add a Web page or a class in the App_code folder too fails with the same error.

I have no idea why this happened just now, I didn't install anything in VS in the last couple of days so it certainly seems like it 'just broke'.

Searched around a bit and found a note on the ASP.NET forums by Mikhail Arkhipov with a hint to re-register the Visual Studio templates. To do this run:

DevEnv.exe /installvstemplates

and life is good again.