Wrangling the Maya Plug-in Wizard

This week I started exploring the Maya plug-in for Visual Studio. Since the whole process took a while to figure out, I thought I'd document the steps I took in case someone else needs it later. The basic set of instructions can be found on the autodesk site here, but additional steps are needed to make everything work (which I will mention below)

1. The MayaPluginWizard.zip file is found in the devkit/plugin folder under wherever you installed Maya (for me it was C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2012\devkit\pluginwizard). From there, open the MayaWizardReadme.txt, which will give you step by step instructions on adding the plugin wizard to VS (take note there are different instruction sets for 32 and 64 bits.
   
2. Unzip the MayaPluginWizard.zip file (I had to copy this onto the desktop first due to permissions). After navigating into the extracted directory, open the MayaPluginWizard.vsz file in a text editor like Notepad++, and make sure Wizard=VsWizard.VsWizardEngine.9.0 refers to the correct version of Visual Studio (VS2008 is 9.0 so I didn't have to change anything).
   
3. Copy the following files to the "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcprojects" directory:
       MayaPluginWizard.vsdir
       MayaPluginWizard.vsz
       MayaPluginWizard.ico
   
4. Copy the *outer* "MayaPluginWizard" directory to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\VCWizards".  NOTE: there should be a MayaPluginWizard directory within a MayaPluginWizard directory after this step.
   
5. Now, since my version of Maya2012 is 64-bit, and VS is 32-bit, I needed to configure my VS for 64-bit applications. I followed the directions listed here (basically you need to install the missing x64 compiler and tools). This requires you to have the VS installer on hand, which was a pain. 
   
6. Close VS if you have it open. Right click on the icon and select "Run as administrator". If you don't do this, you'll get an extremely vague popup saying "project upgrade failed". Figuring out this part was extremely frustrating.
   
7. Now you should be able to create a project using the Maya Plugin Wizard. (Start Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0 and invoke File -> New -> Project -> Visual C++ Projects and select MayaPluginWizard.)
   
8. The project will be created and then the solution can updated and built.