missing specflow templates in VS 2008

Question

I'm new to BDD and Specflow so please help. Today I installed Specflow V1.8.1 on my local machine. During the installation, I made sure that I chose both VS 2008 and 2010 addon. after installation, I can find the new templates such as .feature in VS 2010, but in VS 2008, I can't finds any of the specflow templates, I tried to reinstall for several times, closing all the VS projects, but things didn't get better. What could be the possible cause? Thanks!

Answer 1

I've just run into the same problem as I've had to downgrade to VS2008 for a project. The 1.8.1 installation program works fine for VS2010 but not for VS2008.

UPDATE After installing Specflow installer you'll probably find 3 new specflow*.zip files in the following directory:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp

If you create the sub folder structure *Specflow\1033* and move the following three files into the new 1033 folder:

• SpecFlowEventDefinition.zip
• SpecFlowFeature.zip
• SpecFlowStepDefinition.zip

You can now recreate the item cache using the steps:

1. Open a VS2008 cmd window (under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 | visual studio tools in start menu) - make sure you run as administrator for this.
2. In the DOS window, enter devenv.exe /installvstemplates and run

OTHER METHOD

The following steps could solve the issue for you:

1. Close all VS2008 instances.
2. Copy the non _VB.* files from C:\Program Files (x86)\TechTalk\SpecFlow\ItemTemplates to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\SpecFlow\1033
3. Open a VS2008 cmd window (under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 | visual studio tools in start menu) - make sure you run as administrator for this.
4. In the DOS window, enter devenv.exe /installvstemplates and run.
5. Close the DOS window.
6. Open VS2008 and the items are now available under "Add New" - the options will appear under the top level item "Visual C# Items", they don't appear in any of the child folders.

Note: Step 2 places the templates in the VS install location, whilst step 4 rebuilds the templates and installs them into the cache (here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplatesCache\CSharp\SpecFlow\1033)