Server Explorer unavailable (VS2008Pro)

Question

I recently had some problems with my VS 2008, and was recommended to reinstall. To make sure that the reinstall would solve my problems, i manually uninstalled everything that could have to do with VS and SQL Server (I had the 2008 Express edition installed).

Now when I reinstall SQL Server and Visual Studio, the Server Explorer in VS is dead. When I click the menu option "View\Server Explorer", I get an error message in the Output window reading:

The Visual Studio Explorers and Designers Package ({8D8529D3-625D-4496-8354-3DAD630ECC1B}) did not load because of previous errors. For assistance, contact the package vendor. To attempt to load this package again, type 'devenv /resetskippkgs' at the command prompt.

I run the suggested command, but when I try again I get the exact same error message.

How do I solve this? As I work with the Entity Framework, it is crucial that VS can connect to my database... Any help is very much appreciated!

Answer 1

See this article: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/12/16/504906.aspx

Answer 2

After looking back and forth over the internet, coming across a lot of different answers, i finally managed to get this working. This was my solution:

1. Close all open instances of Visual Studio.

2. Open the Command Prompt in an Administrator context by navigating to Start\All Programs\Accessories, right-clicking Command Prompt and choosing Run as Administrator.

3. Navigate to the install path of VS2008 - in my case (default on Vista x64) it was *C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 9.0\Common7\IDE*

4. Run the command devenv /setup. It takes a little while, but be patient.

5. Start Visual Studio.

After following these steps, the setup is reset to default, so you'll have to reconfigure all startup options, fonts for the text editors etc. This could possibly be helped by running devenv /resetskippkgs instead, however it did not on my machine.

Answer 3

I've had this issue with Visual Studio 2008 as well. Running the devenv commandline statements did not help me though. I basically had to live with it until Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 came out. Since installing Service Pack 1, I haven't had any problems with the Server Explorer.