After watching a video of Anders Hejlsberg explaining how LINQ works I decided it was time to check out the may 2006 LINQ preview myself. I downloaded and installed the bits on my laptop and started Visual Studio. I started a new project and looked for the LINQ project types that should have been installed by the preview but they weren't there! How could this have happened?
I searched the known issues to find a solution to my problem. And there it was or wasn't it? The symptom description looked fair enough: "LINQ project types do not show up in the New Project dialog" This must be my problem or wouldn't it? It seems that when de default location for the templates has been changed, the installer will still install the templates at the default location. Well yeah, but I didn't change the location of my project templates!
After fiddling around with the template files, copying them around to and from all kinds of template directories I took another glance at the list of known issues.
Almost at the top of the issue page there was an other issue marked with the word "new". It's description read "After the CTP is installed no new LINQ-specific project or item templates are added." Aha! Why didn't I see this before? Did they just add this? Well I must have overlooked it the first time but now I know the real cause of the problem at hand. The installer simply assumes that the Visual Basic language service is present in your Visual Studio install location. Well, at my install location the wasn't any Visual Basic language. I wanted to safe some hard disk space back then when I was installing Visual Studio... Unfortunately the workaround for this little inconvenience is to install the Visual Basic language and then reinstall the LINQ preview.
