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Extensibility in Visual Studio is a bit like science and technology-there is always more to learn and discover even for the experts. In this article, I'll present a few tips and tricks you may find helpful when creating packages with the Visual Studio SDK.

With Microsoft SQL Server 2000 it was possible to debug stored procedures from directly within Query Analyzer (see Debugging a SQL Stored Procedure from inside SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer for more information). With SQL Server 2005, however, this functionality was moved out of SQL Server Management Studio and into the Visual Studio IDE. Using this technique, it is possible to step into your stored procedures, one statement at a time, from within Visual Studio. It is also possible to set breakpoints within your stored procedures' statements and have these breakpoints hit when debugging your application.

All editions of SQL Server 2005 include debugging support (including the Express Edition). However, only the Team Systems and Professional editions of Visual Studio enable stored procedure debugging from within the IDE. In short, if you are using Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio Standard Edition then you cannot step through a stored procedure or enter the stored procedure via application debugging.

In this article we will examine how to debug SQL Server 2005 stored procedures through the Visual Studio IDE. We will look at both stepping into a stored procedure directly from the IDE as well as how to set breakpoints within the stored procedure that are then hit when debugging the application.

Development is often a messy process. Often, you need to organize your code to make it more readable, or restructure it to improve readability. Manually polishing code is both cumbersome and error prone. Fortunately, VS.NET 2005's Refactoring Tool is an awesome new feature that lets you modify your code without affecting its functionality - in other words, it helps you organize your C# code without changing the runtime outcome. This article shows you how to use the Refactoring Tool in Visual Studio.NET 2005 to refactor your C# code with ease.

The goal of this pilot is to provide you with direct access to the most requested hotfixes that are produced for our developer tools. A hotfix is a single package that includes one or more files that is used to address a very specific customer problem with a product. You'll find a description and download links below for the most frequently requested hotfixes for the Visual Studio 2005 suite of products.

For example, Microsoft released the fix for annoying bug in VS 2005: "You may receive an error message when you rebuild a solution and try to view a Windows Form in Design view in Visual Studio 2005. ("One or more errors encountered while loading the designer" error)".

Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 greatly enhance the data binding story in Windows Forms. This article explores the classes, interfaces, and coding techniques you can use today in your Windows Forms applications.

This article provides a step-by-step introduction on Localization in ASP.NET 2.0 using the Visual Studio 2005.

Windows Forms 2.0 increases support for data binding via the new BindingNavigator and BindingSource objects, which will save you a lot of effort. Find out how you can perform sorting and searching tasks using data binding and simplify the display of master-detail relationships in tables.

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System brings significant enhancements to the development of business solutions that rely on solutions based on Office, Excel, InfoPath and Outlook 2003. Extending the previous versions, the integration of these tools into Visual Studio 2005 is designed to solve many different business challenges.

In this screencast, available here we take a quick look at these tools and explores some of the core features they provide to developers. After viewing this Fast Tip we encourage you to review the following white paper for more information.

View Looking at Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office

Updated IDE features, new Menu, Toolstrip and multimedia controls, support for background threading, and a new deployment technology called ClickOnce aimed squarely at reducing the number of Web-based intranet applications are among the new capabilities in Visual Studio 2005.

Want to save some time writing code for that next big project? The new code snippets feature in Visual Studio 2005 will enable the developer to have a toolset of commonly used code for performing various functions.