Bizarrely, an error not seen since the early days of IE8 Beta testing has cropped up in, of all things, the IE8 RTM (or, er, RTW – whatever)!

If you work on applications for smart devices (one of my current favorite hobbies) and you try to create a new C++ project for smart devices, you will get the wonderfully explanatory error "project creation failed" in the status bar of Visual Studio.  Thanks for the excellent details, VS team.  Seriously.

It turns out a script error in the wizard (which is driven entirely by the IE platform for some reason) is the cause of all this.  In fact, Microsoft already has a workaround.  A hotfix will be released at some point in the near future.

I'm usually pretty forgiving about software bugs because I know how deadlines and simple mistakes can lead to bad unexpected outcomes.  However, this is just too strange for words.  The entire point of a release candidate is to fix the last outstanding bugs.  Nothing should be done to compromise another feature or which might require regression testing.  You would think that some change in the behavior of the security model (which is responsible for this bug) might have warranted an RC2 to iron out any unexpected kinks. 

But then again, deadlines and stuff.

Anyway, here's the workaround.  Enjoy!