Server Explorer tab empty in Visual Studio

The other evening I decided that I needed to have a quick look at the tables in my database, I'd forgotten quite which tables I had already created and which I'd simply been thinking about recently. So as I was already working in Visual Studio I hopped on over to my Server Explorer tab only to find it was completely empty. Figuring VS was just having one-of-those-moments I shut it down and re-opened it; that didn't fix the problem if anything it just made it worse becaue now the server tab wouldn't show up at all. I tried the keyboard short cut, I tried the menu approach but still nothing.

Next I tried restoring my settings through the Tools > Import and Export... options. I have a slightly modified theme based around the Coding Horror theme, I'm used to the default blue colour for types and many of the other standard settings, but like the off-white background, integer highlighting and line number styles of the Coding Horror theme, so as I said I modified it to my taste. If you're interested there's a download at the end and this is what it looks like:

But that still didn't fix my missing Server Explorer. 

I tried the option under Window > Reset Window Layout. Still no joy.

The Answer!

So finally, and successfully, I gave it the ultimate smack-down, I ran the setup command via the Visual Studio command prompt devenv /setup which Forces Visual Studio to merge the resource metadata that describes menus, toolbars, and command groups from all VSPackages available.

Downloads

MyFavouriteSettings.vssettings (300.98 kb)