This occurred even if I closed the solution and tried to open the individual files. ProcessMonitor.exe revealed nothing. Disabling plugins didn’t help. Deleting .suo and .user files didn’t help.

Googling for a solution revealed a couple of patterns. People were getting this either in VB.NET Windows Forms projects, profiling C++ applications or trying to open TFS work items. The latter resonated. TFS, my long-time nemesis, we meet in battle again.

I tried removing the local path mapping for the project in my TFS workspace, deleted the folder and recreated the mapping. Win.

However, there’s a catch. Nesting the files causes the file names to be overwritten. In this case, the .hbm.xml suffix gets dropped. That effectively prevents Configuration.AddAssembly() from finding the mapping information. A way around this pitfall is defining the dependency as follows:

<EmbeddedResource include="ServiceRequest.hbm.xml">
<DependentUpon>ServiceRequest.cs</DependentUpon>
<LogicalName>ServiceRequest.hbm.xml</LogicalName>
</EmbeddedResource>

Thanks go to Sami for cracking this nut with me.

I also use the awesome Sonic File Finder addon. It allows you to search for files in your solutions. Programming can be a frantic excercise in jumping between numerous code files and the solution explorer is a really poor way to do it. Most of the time you know what file you’re going for, so just hitting ctrl+, and typing a part of the file name saves you a bunch of time and sanity.

I also used to use the ApexSQL Edit for its superior performance and intellisense feature but it kinda got rendered obsolete after the release of Sql Server 2008 with its built-in intellisense. ApexSQL Diff, however, is a great tool to have in your belt. It does what you’d expect: compares database schemas and merges them. It performs surprisingly complicated merges without breaking a sweat. Both of the aforementioned applications by ApexSQL are of extremely high quality, they perform well and are stable as the negation of something not very stable. Highly recommended.

http://www.codeplex.com/VSFlatSolutionExp