I was working on a linq project and needed to connect to my database to make some changes in the linq to sql when I realized that my server explorer windlow would not open. I clicked view - server explorer and just got nothing, zip, nada. After some headaches and some hunting in other blogs I found this little VS command line command that solved the problem.
devenv /resetsettings
I read several blogs about it and the general idea is that if you had a previous version of VS installed and uninstalled it to install a newer version that the settings get messed up. This command sets your setting back to the default out of the box settings. So if you're having problems that seem to be dev environment instead of your code, you might want to give this a try.
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