Visual Studio 2008 crashes when opening azure projects

Question

I'm trying to write my first Azure application with Visual Studio 2008. Whenever I open a solution which contains a Cloud project, I get a SQL Server error message. This problem is with the development environment / SDK configuration. I get the exception before I've executed, or even written a single line of code. I am not trying to connect to SQL Azure, or for that matter any other SQL database that I know of. The error is:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)

I found this article about why this condition occurs but I've not been able to figure out what visual studio is trying to do.

Answer 1

Is this SQL connection a SQL Azure connection? If so, SQL Azure has a firewall, and by default, all incoming connections are blocked. You need to add your IP address (or a range containing your IP address) to the "allowed" list. You can do this easily in the SQL Azure portal.

Answer 2

This problem turned out to be related to invalid Data Connection entries in Server Explorer. Deleting the invalid entries seems to have solved the problem.

Answer 3

This was apparently some error in my visual studio setup regarding databases in Server Explorer. Deleting the connections fixed this issue.