I worked with the carnage that was the complex relationship
between
VS2005 and SQL 2005 betas and CTPs for pretty much the entire beta
cycle and got used to strange thinngs happening in the VS IDE. On
release I installed the RTM bits and everything
looked fine. However, teaching for DevelopMentor
I frequently end up using machines that I haven't myself configured. I
started to notice that the menus were sometimes different and took this
to be that they were different because I was debugging / editing a
certain file type / etc.
However, at a recent Guerrilla.NET
we had a conflict between the lab instructions and VS setup that meant
we had to investigate why a menu item wasn't appearing. It turns out
there are two important decisions that affect your menus. The first is
the question that you answer when you use VS for the first time "what
kind of developer are you" and depending on what you select you get
tuned menus. I believe that selecting "Visual Studio Developer" gets
you the full set.
The second issue is more subtle though. The order in which you
install SQL Server 2005 and VS 2005 is significant. SQL Server 2005 can
install the Business Intelligence Workbench which is hosted in the VS
shell. If you install SQL Server 2005 first you may find that
your menus are restricted to the BI Workbench items (an example of this
is having only two items on your Debug menu).
The remedy to this is not obvious. I spent some time trawling
through the Tools/Options
dialog to no avail. Finally I discovered the feature was controlled by Tools /
Import and Export Settings. If you choose to import to you
can import one of the other configurations. Hopefully this post will
save others some time and frustration.