When Visual Studio 2008 Server Explorer is Missing

Microsoft has developed a set of development tools called Visual Studio. The latest version is the Visual Studio Foundation 2010. But many users stil employ the 2008 version. And many still experience problems while working on their ASP.NET web applications. In this post I want to show you what to do when Visual Studio 2008 Server Explorer is missing.

It might happened when you working with the Entity Data Model Wizard. Suddenly it close unexpectedly after choosing Generate from the database. You can’t find the Server Explorer tab either. It has disappeared. So what you should do to fix missing server explorer in Visual Studio 2008?

If you had tried many ways to solve this problem and not successful with any of those, then you can try to fix it with a quick command. Here are the steps to fix such problem:

1. You have to close all Visual Studio’s instances
2. Reset your Visual Studio 2008 environment by
3. Go to the ‘All Program’ and click the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
4. Click the Tools folder
5. Find the Command Prompt application
6. Reset your visual studio by typing devenv/resetskippkgs at the command prompt, or
7. type C:\devenv/reset on your Windows console

After it has reseted, your Visual Studio will reload normally and the problem has solved. This tricks also can be applied on Command Prompt of both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2010.