Today my installation of the Blend 2 September Preview stopped using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 when I select "Edit in Visual Studio..." in the Files palette but instead chose to use Visual Studio 2005. I never had the 2005 version installed on the machine but it came via the SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition install. SQL Server 2005 uses Visual Studio 2005 for its Business Intelligence Development Studio.

Currently Blend 2 does not offer any built-in way to configure which version of Visual Studio should be used. The Blend Configurator tool published by the Expression Blend team does not help with the September preview, even though it shows a success dialog should you run it.

The only working way to force Blend 2 to use VS 2008 Beta 2 again was to completely uninstall all VS 2005 components, the Blend 2 preview, all VS 2008 components and reinstall in the correct order. So I reinstalled

1. SQL Server 2005 (which includes VS 2005 components)

2. Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

3. Blend 2

It seems as if Blend 2 always uses the version of Visual Studio that has been installed latest. So should you for whatever reason happen to install a VS 2005 component while you already have VS 2008 installed, this is potentially going to break the Blend 2 - VS 2008 integration.

I have posted this to the Silverlight Forums and asked Scott Guthrie to forward this issue to the Blend team. Maybe the final release will give us a nice version selector in the Options section.