Coming back from the Holidays, my Visual Studio 2005 installation would fail trying to create a new native Smart Device Project. Uninstalling the Windows Mobile SDKs and reinstalling them... and even uninstalling/reinstalling Visual Studio did not solve the issue.
I was finally reminded of an issue I had seen a while back. Installing IE7 caused this problem! Fortunately there is a workaround. Fernando Zandoná, the PM in charge of our Windows Mobile SDK logged this issue and many others a while back in his blog.
Unable to Create Native (C++) ProjectsVC++ Project Wizards are pretty much HTML files + scripts - Visual Studio uses IE to render and present those "web pages" as a wizard. The problem is that, due to the new security model, IE7 does not trust some of those scripts; as a result you keep getting the "New Project" dialog and can't move forward on the wizard. The workaround here is to let IE know that the smart device VC++ wizard is a nice guy and ok to run. You will need to open the registry entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\PreApproved And add a new entry named: {D245F352-3F45-4516-B1E6-04608DA126CC}
Unable to Create Native (C++) ProjectsVC++ Project Wizards are pretty much HTML files + scripts - Visual Studio uses IE to render and present those "web pages" as a wizard. The problem is that, due to the new security model, IE7 does not trust some of those scripts; as a result you keep getting the "New Project" dialog and can't move forward on the wizard. The workaround here is to let IE know that the smart device VC++ wizard is a nice guy and ok to run.
You will need to open the registry entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\PreApproved
And add a new entry named: {D245F352-3F45-4516-B1E6-04608DA126CC}
This solved the issue and I can get back to coding!
-Luis Cabrera