I had an annoying thing happen earlier this week.  I was looking at DotNetNuke for a potential project and used their VSI package which allows you to create new sites from within Visual Studios New WebSite wizard. 

Due to an incompatibility I wanted to go from version 4.2 to 4.0, there was no un-install functionality for the VSI package and installing 4.0 over the top of 4.2 made visual studio just freeze trying to bring up the new web project dialog.

After a bit of googling I found Microsoft have a power toys kit for VSI, it allows listing of all installed VSI packages with the option to un-install them, it also gives you lots of help to create your own package, something I haven't looked at yet but at least I know it's there if I need it.

So if you want to trim down some of the packages you've installed I'd highly recommend getting this tool (just look on microsoft/msdn downloads, I'm sure the link will change if I put it here).

' Check to see if we are being debugged - (this is effectively the only way i've
' found to check "in ide")
If System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached Then
' Force the code to bread
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break()
End If

This is an alternative to Debug.Assert( )

If you haven't looked into using attributes you really should.  We've all used the serialization ones I'm sure but think about using your own, it's not that difficult, just a simple class with an attribute telling it that it itself is an attribute and where it can be used then a bit of code using reflection techniques to interogate them.

I'm using it as an ORM technique, describing the stored procs to get/save classes and also describing the property to field mappings.  It's early days with my architecture but I'm liking it, for all those simple objects its going to do away with the whole persistence code that we all write over and over.  I've seen lots of other ORM solutions but attributes is my personal choice of where I'm going, it keeps the description with the object rather than in some config file or other complicated solution.  It also means you can carry your class to another project with ease, very little dependency involved as long as you have your ORM persistance class/assembly carried over as well.