Visual Studio 2008 fails to create BizTalk 2009 project

I got bitten by this (again) on my new machine, putting this note here for my own reference as much as anything.

When attempting to create a BizTalk 2009 project in Visual Studio 2008…

• File –> New Project… –> [Any BizTalk Project Template]

or

• (From Solution) Add –> New Project… –> [Any BizTalk Project Template]

…you might get presented with the following error message:

• Creating project ‘[Project name]’… project creation failed.

When you install Service Pack 1 for VS2008 it seems to overwrite a Registry key used by the BizTalk 2009 SDK. Putting the Registry key back to its original value fixes the problem.

The safest way to achieve this is to repair the BizTalk 2009 installation after installing Service Pack 1 for VS2008. The repair only takes a few moment to run (or at least it did for me). Some on-line resources suggest fixing the Registry key manually but I have trust issues with that and so long as you have the BizTalk 2009 ISO on hand, the repair operation takes about the same amount of time as opening RegEdit.exe and finding the right key (making sure you get the correct 32/64-bit Registry key).