Dataset Designer not working (Visual Studio 2008)

Recently, my development machine's VS 2008 suddenly can't open the designer view for dataset file [xsd].
If you guys facing the same problem with me, you can try to run the command below:-


Open Visual Studio Tools-> Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt.

1. devenv/resetskippkgs
2. devenv /resetsettings 
3. devenv /setup

For my case, 3rd option solved my problem without uninstall/reinstall.

Windows Azure

The Azure Services Platform uses a specialized operating system, called Windows Azure, to run its "fabric layer" — a cluster hosted at Microsoft's datacenters that manages computing and storage resources of the computers and provisions the resources (or a subset of them) to applications running on top of Windows Azure. Windows Azure has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Windows Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services.

The platform includes five services Live Services, SQL Services (which is now Microsoft SQL Azure), .NET Services, SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services which the developers can use to build the applications that will run in the cloud. A client library, in managed code, and associated tools are also provided for developing cloud applications in Visual Studio. Scaling and reliability are controlled by the Windows Azure Fabric Controller so the services and environment don't crash if one of the servers crash within the Microsoft datacenter and provides the management of the user's web application like memory resources and load balancing.

The Azure Services Platform can currently run .NET Framework applications compiled for the CLR, while supporting the ASP.NET application framework and associated deployment methods to deploy the applications onto the cloud platform. Two SDKs have been made available for interoperability with the Azure Services Platform: The Java SDK for .NET Services and the Ruby SDK for .NET Services. These enable Java and Ruby developers to integrate with .NET Services.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_azure

Missing Immediate Window in VS2008

Sometimes when we using VS2008 and plan to use immediate window to debug, we found that it is missing! weird...I didnt change the layout setting...

To put it back; is very simple.

1. Goto tool>customize
2. Tab to commands; select Debug categories
3. Drag the 'Immediate' back to the area you want it to display.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 issue (Terminate Unexpected)

Recently I installed the VS2008 SP1 on my development machine, after that I face a strange issue; where I can't add custom web control (right click>choose items), after a while, VS2008 terminate directly.

Problem is cause by the conflict between SP1 and the "Power Commands" tools.
Thanks for the MSDN forum.

Solution: Uninstall the Power Commands tools.