For a change, I won't write today about SQL Server - even if I've seen something very interesting this week. So, no code for today but I might come back to that some other time.

My main development tools are VS.NET 2005/2008 and SQL Server 2005/2008 - all installed on my good old laptop (named Ziggy) that I'm using at home. A while ago I start having problems with VS.NET 2008. First was crushing on every IDE close, but that didn't bother me too much... Unfortunately that was just the beggining. Next thing was to refuse to load packages related to Silverlight and WPF - and that was a problem for me!

All previous week I was trying to find a solution to avoid a full computer re-install. After every operation of un-install/install with service packs and windows updates and wasted time, a new set of packages (all the time different!) refuses to load. I searched the net right, left and center to find a solution, but none of them were applicable.

I reach a 2 conclusions after that long work of reading people installations problems:

• Always install VS2005 and 2008 on C drive! Mine were installed on E, and I was having some surprises when looking in the registry! (I could see clearly that was trying to load some files located on C while they exist only on E) - that problem was surely caused by a windows update, (I have no idea which one) where a 'senior' programmer was doing a stupid hard-coding.
• Try to do not install BETA software... 90% of solutions were explaining how to solve an issue in case you were brave enough to install whatever BETA

Anyway... last night I start re-installing everything from scratch. For me, is a pain - I can't understand people that enjoy this kind of work - and I know a couple of them. Actually, that was half of the reason for no code today :) - I'm not completely back; still installing while blogging.
But that wasn't all unfortunately. I have an external HDD, where I saved data from my laptop last night before re-installation. The big surprise comes in the morning when the partition from my backup disk was lost :(. That was too nice. In case you need to recover a partition try EASEUS Partition Master, was doing the job pretty quick in my case.