Visual Studio 2005, LINQ and Refactoring Problems

I haven't played with it a lot but but the most obvious was the far from complete support from the IDE. Given it is not a complete product I'm not blaming MS for it. What I blame MS for is the fact that installing LINQ is a destructive process i.e.: it damages some of the existing features of VS 2005.

For me the One thing that hurt the most was the fact that the refactoring SmartTags stopped working from a keyboard shortcut and that the Refactor option was missing from the context menu of the code window.

Since I could not imagine working without some useful shortcuts I started the process to recover the lost features. I've tried to reset the shortcuts from Tools-Options-General-Keyboard menu but it had no effect. Next I have tried to reset all settings using Tools-Import and Export Settings - no effect. Next there came Google.

I have found and that someone had a similar problem and there was a solution. Few posts from the top there is a 4 steps instruction (which didn't work for me) and than a 5th step which finally worked. I'm putting the stepps I have followed in for your convenience:

1. Start up RegEdit.exe


2. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Packages\{A066E284-DCAB-11D2-B551-00C04F68D4DB}\SatelliteDLL


3. Edit the "Path" value and change it from "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#\VCSPackages\1033\" to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#\VCSPackages\"


4. Restart Visual Studio and see if these problems are fixed?


5. Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE and run devenv /setup followed by devenv /resetuserdata followed by devenv /resetsettings CSharp.

All this stuff makes me wonder. I have been using beta software since I have learned using computers but I cannot remember having this kind of problems. Maybe the betas I use are not as complicated as Microsoft products but hey! They are not developed by the army of developers!