Selfelected

>

Short story:

Totally wierd.  One day VSNet of my colleague refused to open a form.

The solution was to run “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe” /ResetSkipPkgs

Long story:

VSNet 2008 suddenly refused to open a form in a VBNet project with the message

—————————
Microsoft Visual Studio
—————————
There is no editor available for ‘C:\Documents and Settings\myusername\Local Settings\Application Data\Temporary Projects\WindowsApplication1\Form1.vb’.
Make sure the application for the file type (.vb) is installed.
—————————
OK  
—————————

(How to copy error message dialogues.)

Googling didn’t give much.

Repair did nothing.  It stopped after a “…has encountered a problem…” with Ok as only choice.
Uninstallation din’t work; the same error as above.
Uninstalled through a tool found here.  Reinstalled VSNet2008 and Service Pack 1.  The “total uninstallation” was a fraud, the old projects still populated the MRU list :-(  And the problem remained.

My colleague created a new winform project in C# where the problem was the same but the error message different.

—————————
Microsoft Visual Studio
—————————
Project ‘WindowsFormsApplication1’ could not be opened because the Microsoft Visual C# 2008 compiler could not be created. QueryService for ‘{74946829-37A0-11D2-A273-00C04F8EF4FF}’ failed.
—————————
OK  
—————————

This gave us more Google fodder to find more switches here.

After running “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe” /ResetSkipPkgs the sky was sunny again.

This took the better part of a day.

Why didn’t uninstall all remove everything.  Who do Microsoft think they are?  Adobe?

(the dialogue dumps above were easily copied with ctrl-c. read more here)