Installing Visual Studio SP1 wiped out my item templates

Sounds like a conspiracy theory, so maybe I should put it all in caps, with spelling mistakes: INSTALING VISHUL STUDIO SP1 NUKKED MY DX NEW ITEMS IKONS. KTHXBYE.

A customer phoned me up this afternoon saying that he'd just installed DXperience Enterprise but couldn't find any XtraReports items in his toolbox. He was worried in case the install had failed in some way. Ha, I thought, I'll just walk him through creating a new application that has a report, and show that the XtraReports controls only show up in the toolbox if the designer is showing a report form. You know, that friendly CTO helping the customer thing.

So we started off together. Create a new solution, I said, and we did. OK, to add a report to this project, I said, we right-click and select New Item, and select XtraReports... WHERE THE HECK HAVE ALL MY ITEMS GONE?

For some unfathomable reason, installing SP1 had wiped all third-party item templates from this list. It was bare. No XAF, no XPO, no XtraReports, nothing. A tiny little tab still promised some DXCore items, but otherwise zip, nada, zilch. I shivered.

Meanwhile, I'm sure my customer was slowly backing away from the phone: the CTO of DevExpress doesn't know how to create a simple XtraReports app? What the... I made some reassuring noises -- OK, maybe they were just noises -- and we finished the call with my abject apologies.

I had a look at my other machine which I use for travel. There I'd installed SP1 and DXperience 2008.2.2 (I was late in updating it on that machine) in that order, and, lo, the new items page was full.

So there was nothing for it but to uninstall XAF and DXperience and then reinstall them (hmm, now I write this perhaps Repair might have done the job in a shorter time) and full functionality was restored. So, if you run into this, you'll know what to do.

Meanwhile, if you did call me this afternoon about XtraReports, I can lead you though the basics over the phone now. Honest .

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