Hi All,
I installed the SP1 on my system, and from then itself I wasnt able to see the server explorer on my dev environment, and also was not able to create a Connection data string.I used the get the error
"object reference not set to a instance of an object"
No re-installations of the VS work.
I googled for the solutions, and it came to rescue! There was a post on a blog which stated :
"
Recently I faced a situation where a software developer using Visual Studio 2008 wasn't able to do virtually anything in database projects.
It was possible to create a new database project, but on many operations, includingImport Database Schema and
New Schema Comparison an error message stating
Object reference not set to an instance of an object was shown.
I was told that reinstall of Visual Studio doesn't help. Also System Restore made situation only worse.
Accidentally it was discovered that this is a per-user problem (only developers account was affected). After some research I discovered that most likely some of Visual Studio components have had some problems previously so they were skipped from loading.
So a simple
"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /ResetSkipPkgs
in Command Prompt of developers account solved this problem.
Most likely this method (resetting skipped packages) can also solve some other "cryptic" per-user problems of Visual Studio 2008.
"
It worked fantastically well !! Saving me through all the pain of finding such non-sensical errors!
Posting it for all to benefit, just in case!
Rachna Kejariwal