A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs

December 26, 2007 @ 1:59 am- from Maui, Hawaii

I'm pretty happy with running VS 2008, especially since I've retrofitted my laptop with 4gig. But there are also a number of annoying bugs that occur rather frequently. This is especially frustrating because I pointed out a number of these during beta and they didn't get addressed. Let's see which ones you can identify with:

The missing View Source in the Web Editor
At times it appears that while you are editing an open document in the ASP.NET markup editor or the visual editor the View Source shortcut on the context menu is not there. It's inconsistent but quite annoying when it isn't. The behavior is also different in Web Application Projects and Web Projects. In Web Projects I never seem to see the View Source button. In WAP but menu option sometimes shows sometimes doesn't. There are other ways to navigate - you can use F7/Shift F7 to cycle through the various view modes of the designer,split, markup and source views although I find the keyboard shortcuts highly confusing as they change depending on which context you are in.

This Document is opened by another project with ASP.NET related files

Quite frequently I get this message in an warning dialog when opening files in ASP.NET projects. I'm very certain that the files are NOT open in another project. I do have other instances of VS.NET open usually but even after shutting them down and retrying - same deal. I get this error all the time now.

Open Folder in Windows Explorer bombs - always now

This handy feature worked for me at some point, but now all I get is:

This operation could not be completed. Unspecified error.

Thanks - that's very helpful. It's a little beyond me how a call to ShellExecute() can possibly be a problem <shrug>. But damn, I miss that feature already and I don't really want to install another add-in to get it.

Opening a Web Service or Handler in ASP.NET

During the VS 2008 beta there was some odd behavior where when you clicked on script mapped files like ASHX (handlers) or SVC (WCF Services) and the code editor would pop up the actual code instead of the small markup page - to actually get the markup page you had to use the shortcut menu. A little weird maybe but it's actually what I do most so this worked well. Looks like in RTM though that's gone. Not only that though with the View Source button missing the code behind file doesn't open except for having to hunt into APP_CODE manually. Minor annoyance, but still annoying.

IE Locking when starting to Debug Web Project

This is not a new problem - it's been around in Visual Studio 2003/2005, but it seems with VS 2008 it has gotten even worse. The issue is that when you start debugging a Web project it launches Internet Explorer and attaches the debugger for debugging. If IE isn't running no problem it all works fine. But if you launch a debug session (or Run a Web), keep it running and then later try to debug again IE will lock up. When it does Visual Studio will hang too as it now waits for Internet Explorer to respond . So now you have both IE and Visual Studio locked and IE won't shut down - it has to be killed. As soon as you do Visual Studio shuts down from debugging. This problem is likely due to issues with the COM Automation of IE and the way the debugger tries to attach to IE. And it's likely worse because the changes in script debugging in VS 2008 which by default enables script debugging. But there's gotta be some way to detect the state of the IE instance being attached BEFORE trying to attach and hanging it? Hey if necessary kill that IE instance and restart it for debugging - anything is better than hanging it!!!

This has gotten so bad I've switched to FireFox as my default debugging browser, but this isn't great either because VS will launch a new instance on the desktop each time and if you use FF you don't get script debugging through the project, which after all is one of the nice improvements in VS 2008. I'm pretty sure just about EVERYBODY debugging ASP.NET projects has hit this problem on a regular basis. This really needs to get fixed!

This reminds me of a funny incident at the MVP summit when Anders Hejlsberg was giving a LINQ demo using ASP.NET and ran into this bug every few minutes. Anders is a pretty calm guy usually, but you could tell he was gettin' pissed (and made some funny 'heads will roll' remarks - apparently an empty thread <g>) when launching and locking up IE. I feel the same way - this is a big time sink especially sometimes when IE will only kill with Task Manager (sometimes I can get it to kill by repeatedly clicking on the Close button but it depends how deeply locked it is).

All of these are annoyances more than anything, but they are enough of a problem to interrupt work flow significantly in bulk. Let's hope SP1 addresses these issues.

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re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Matt Phipps December 26, 2007 @ 5:41 am

I had a very frustrating Christmas break because of these issues. Noteably, I was working with datasets (.xsd) and would get the annoying 'document-in-use' error. Checking, I made sure it wasn't open in Studio, Notepad++ or any other editor. The cure: I closed VS and restarted it.

I also ran into the IE lock and other disappearing context items.

If it weren't for Linq and framework targetting, I'd be all over uninstalling and going back to 2005 until SP1.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Rachit December 26, 2007 @ 5:52 am

I see these errors too often:
- This Document is opened by another project with ASP.NET related files
- IE Locking when starting to Debug Web Project

Hopefully, pre-SP1 is released soon... ;)

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Luke Breuer December 26, 2007 @ 7:25 am

"This Document is opened by another project with ASP.NET related files"

Try using Process Explorer and the "Find Handle" command to see who has a file locked. Some programs do not like to close handles immediately after they're done using said files.

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Tom December 26, 2007 @ 9:12 am

I've another issue with debugging using a web project, it just takes countless seconds to load up all symbols each time I hit IE after debugging as been lauched. Each symbol is loaded (very slowly) for each single page within the project, does anyone know a solution to this, do these guys know what lazy loading is instead of loading all the pages at once when you only hit a single one within the project. grmpf

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Milan Negovan December 26, 2007 @ 10:41 am

Rick, "IE locking" is driving me insane, too. Such a huge time waster... I guess SP1, due in 2012, will fix it. That "script manager" that appears in the solution tree is sooo not helping either.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Rick Strahl December 26, 2007 @ 12:23 pm

Luke - I think it's Visual Studio that's actually locking the file multipe times somehow. Nothing else is accessing those files. I've even gone as far as restarting IIS (figuring maybe it's putting a soft lock on a file) a few times when this happens but I still see it... Inconsistent.

As to overall stability and performance - VS 2008 is working well for me - I wouldn't consider going back to VS 2005 which in many ways is slower and less stable for me. VS 2005 crashed or just disappeared on me occasionally where VS 2008 has never crashed on me yet.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Nicholas December 26, 2007 @ 2:00 pm

Are you sure you guys aren't indexing your code directories or anything? When I added my local source code depository folder to Vista's indexing, I had nothing but problems.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Matt Phipps December 26, 2007 @ 5:28 pm

Indexing?

Oh, good grief. If that is the problem, I'm going back to XP as soon as SP3 is out. Please, tell me that that is not the issue. Please.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Luke Breuer December 26, 2007 @ 6:21 pm

Instead of thinking, why don't you actually check to see who has handles open on the file? Actually, I'm not sure how much info one can get about handles with Process Explorer, so perhaps you should use Process Monitor instead. Hopefully this'll nail the issue down so no more thinking or guessing is necessary. :-p

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Abhijeet P December 26, 2007 @ 8:02 pm

Another annoying issue I've seen is that if you have your project structure as follows:
1) CSS file at the root
2) All Webforms under a folder "WebForms"
3) image files under a folder "images"

Now if you are working on any of the web forms in the source and or split view and if the CSS has reference to any images(say a path to an image file for a background).
the designer screws up the path. In my case the path to some of the images in the css file were changed from images\pic1.gig to ..\..\images\pic1.jpg and in some cases to
..\..\..\..\..\images\pic1.jpg

This is really annoying

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Rick Strahl December 26, 2007 @ 9:23 pm

@Luke - Man you're strict, Dad. Ok, ok you're right. I took a look with Process Monitor, saw it fail, but I can't make much sense out of the data (file monitoring for .aspx files). The only thing accessing the files is DevEnv and System. Nothing else. Worse looking at the list there are no failed accesses in the file access operations - they all return Success except for FASTIO DISALLOWED which is a valid test/retry scenario.

FWIW, this occurs in a stock Web Project (a demo project) and in this project almost any attempt to 're-open' a file that's already open in the editor results in this message.

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Milan Negovan December 27, 2007 @ 6:48 am

How about the age-old problem of cancelling a search? You can't run another one because you get a message that the previous one is still running. I was hoping they'd fix it because you have to either shut down VS, go hunt for a search process and kill it; or, you'd press CTRL + ScrollLock. Wasn't it on the bug list forever and ever? *sigh*

Oh, and my VS crashes almost every time I close it.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Luke Breuer December 27, 2007 @ 6:54 am

@Rick - I like to solve problems, what can I say? :-) Feel free to email me an export of the list of operations, filtered to a single .aspx, with notations on when you first opened VS, first opened the file, then opened the file again only to get the ugly error message. If this offers no clues, I would have to guess it's an internal Visual Studio locking/notification mechanism that's broken. Regardless, this extra info should be quite helpful in filing a bug that provides lots of information and should therefore be on the easier side to fix.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by John S. December 27, 2007 @ 8:31 pm

Pretty sure the "This Document is opened by another project" is caused by an add-in. After having a dialog about it with the web dev tools team, I narrowed it down to Visual SVN in my case. I notified the Visual SVN guys who said they were able to replicate it and are working on a fix.

See http://john-sheehan.com/blog/index.php/visual-studio-2008-first-bad-impressions/

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by John S. December 27, 2007 @ 8:33 pm

Re: "Oh, and my VS crashes almost every time I close it."
I get this a lot too, but mostly when I'm closing two instances at the same time.

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by KTW March 13, 2008 @ 1:03 pm

I have experienced a similar issue.

When starting the debugger for an ASP.NET application, it would then lock up IE7 as described, and at the same time crash VS, displaying the error report dialog.

The problem was the Server Info plugin, for the IE7Pro add-on.

Hope this can help someone.

- KTW -

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Jaime Weise April 11, 2008 @ 12:18 pm

This browser problem has been a real headache for me. It seems that it is related to the indexing as mentioned. I typed index in the start menu search bar, followed by clicking the indexing options program. Then I clicked the advanced tab and clicked 'Restore Defaults'. I restarted my computer; there is a message when you choose restore defaults that says it may take a while to rebuild the default index. After restarting I fired up visual studio .net 2008. Then built and started debugging my application. Then I went to click the x on the browser window to close and hopefully have the problem go away. The browser was still hanging as usual. There did seem to be something going on in the background but I couldn't really make out what it was. I didn't manually kill the browser for a minute and I was about to do so when the browser closed on its own.

I am guessing that what was going on in the background was the rebuilding of the index that I had set to restore to default. After the browser closed on its own I tested it a few more times and the problems seems to have gone away--"fingers crossed".

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Vancouver Web Development May 20, 2008 @ 4:07 pm

Has anyone come up to an answer for this one ? Just checking back.

-Jaime

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Sam July 03, 2008 @ 3:53 pm

I have been having an on going problem ever since upgrading to VS 2008.

While in source view and when working on an aspx file, sometimes when I make a selection or highlight some code to copy/paste it Visual Studio will freeze up for about 20 or 30 seconds and then it will unfreeze. While it freezes sometimes it will pop up in the corner with something like "visual studio is not responding due to a internal process, contact microsoft if this continues"

Anyhelp help or suggestions on this would be super, thanks!

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Nick H July 14, 2008 @ 6:43 pm

I've had couple of issue that really irk me.

The freeze up. Seems like using cilpboard or even sometimes just flipping between source causes a huge delay. I got the hot fix that's suppose to be in SP1 to fix it but it hasn't helped much. It's getting to the point VS is usable it's so bad. I've started doing other things while it freezes - it happens many many times an hour while I'm working.

I use TopStyle to edit my CSS files. If make it the default editor, VS 2008 POPS every style sheet in my project everytime I open one that looks at a stylesheet. This is just down right annoying - but at least, unlike the freezes, it's easy to fix. I just leave studio as the default and use a right click open with to get to TopStyle.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by brent September 18, 2008 @ 9:03 am

We use VS 2008 for web development and there is a very annoying bug that pretty much just goes in and adds/deletes/merges lines of code with completely unrelated actions. I've had this happen countless times. I will make a change to a page then later be viewing it and something has duplicated, or been cut off.

This most recently happened yesterday when I made a very simple change. There are 2 images in a row, and all I did was change each image name around to reverse their locations. Saved, then uploaded.

When I viewed the page there were different errors and when I went to compare the code in that to the previous version there was one instance of a line of code being duplicated, and another where it seemed that 2 lines had somehow been merged together with some charactors being deleted. I did not touch any of those things and yet somehow they changed.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Reid October 06, 2008 @ 10:17 am

I have had a heck of a time using the Style Management.

At face value it seems well designed and it is. Yet after working with it for a while over the last few months I can say that it has one glaring bug. It will periodically, randomly scramble a portion of your style definitions. This can be a very time consuming bug.

I would advise users to backup their stylesheets often.

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Craig October 13, 2008 @ 11:49 am

My most annoying issue occurs when I make a change in design view, save the page, view the page in the browser and my change is not reflected. Upon going back to design view, my changes are gone. VS 2008 appears to be deleting and not saving the changes I make. GRRR!

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by David October 31, 2008 @ 6:53 am

I am having the same problem as Craig. I make changes in the design view and swith to the source view and the changes are not there. They still show up in the design view but are not in the Source. If I close and reopen they are gone.

This is far more than annoying this is nearly unusable....

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Johnny Ho December 26, 2008 @ 8:35 pm

I am running into a very annoying problem. When I created a blank page and give the wrapper div a background and set the height to be, let say 200px. When I run it from vs2008 I should see the page background (of 200px), but with vs2008 the background doesn't show up at all. If I place some content like some paragraphs of text block, then the background will show up.

Don't know if anybody has the same problem like that and what the solution to correct it.

Thanks

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by John January 16, 2009 @ 6:57 am

I am also having the "save in design view" issue that Craig and David have. Make some changes in design view, and immediately notice that the asterisk that indicates a page has unsaved changes does not appear. But I save anyway, and then close the page. When I re-open the page the changes are gone. I also notice that the "source" screen doesn't reflect the changes and the only way to get the changes to stick is to type them in manually via the source window. Very annoying!

# open multiple documents in visual studio 2008
by cito January 20, 2009 @ 3:27 pm

hi I have a problem,
I use visual studio 2008 and I can open only one document at time.
If I open a document when a document is already open, visual studio
close the first and open the second.
In visual studio 2005 I don't have never seen nothing similar...

can anyone help me???
thanks in advance,
cito.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by nsno March 11, 2009 @ 7:09 am

Has anyone please got a fix for the "delay notification" problem which has started occurring on my home PC running VS2008 making it unuseable my work PC doesn't have a problem.

Thanks in advance

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by gmirli March 23, 2009 @ 8:42 am

Craig, David and John,

Are the problems you having similar to that described in http://forums.asp.net/p/1380268/3028683.aspx (7th post, by me)? That is, a panel with a control that has a collection of items in it?

I scratched my head for long until I switched to Split View and found out what's going on.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Behnam April 07, 2009 @ 5:52 am

I have two big problems with VS2008 and ASP.NET
1-Sometimes changing properties of server controls in Design mode don't affect in ASPX Source and when I Save and close the Page, all changes have gone

2-My Event handler in code behind run twice for some controls, for example, when I Click an ImageButton, the Event fires two time, sometimes the Event Handler for another ImageButton Click fires too.

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Charles Boyung May 13, 2009 @ 11:23 am

nsno,

If you try to open your .aspx and .ascx files by right clicking and choosing "Open With", and then selecting the Html Editor instead of the default (or making the Html editor the default), the problem might go away. There may be a few intellisense items that don't come up for you this way, and it doesn't really solve the underlying issue (whatever that is), but when it started happening on one of my computers, this solved it.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Digvijay Khairnar May 28, 2009 @ 5:27 am

I am facing a problem of getting comments in .aspx file deleted automatically.

When i comment some markup in .aspx file with VS2008's comment button, the commented markup gets deleted when i save the changes.

By default the VS 2008 comments the markup with <%-- %--> style.

But if i comment the markup with  style it doesnt get deleted.

Can anyone help me out ?

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Joe June 04, 2009 @ 9:34 am

I am having the exact same problem as Sam commented about up above.. Any ideas?

here is what Sam wrote:

While in source view and when working on an aspx file, sometimes when I make a selection or highlight some code to copy/paste it Visual Studio will freeze up for about 20 or 30 seconds and then it will unfreeze. While it freezes sometimes it will pop up in the corner with something like "visual studio is not responding due to a internal process, contact microsoft if this continues"

# re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Christopher Hawkins June 17, 2009 @ 4:46 pm

I'm having the same problem:

While in source view and when working on an aspx file, sometimes when I make a selection or highlight some code to copy/paste it Visual Studio will freeze up for about 20 or 30 seconds and then it will unfreeze. While it freezes sometimes it will pop up in the corner with something like "visual studio is not responding due to a internal process, contact microsoft if this continues"

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Brian J July 01, 2009 @ 9:55 pm

Hey i am having a few problems in VS 2008 asp.net applications. A few have already been specified.

1. Whenever i try to preview with or without debugging IE gives me an "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" I do get the small pop up in the lower corner that says "ASP.NET Development Server Port ..." But I have never gotten a page to display. The same thing occurs when i click on "ASP.NET Configuration"

2. In design view none of my images will appear, The only images that appear are the background images specified through CSS.

So far those are the only ones that setting me back completely..

Thanks for suggestions,
Brian

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Apka July 08, 2009 @ 9:09 am

"This Document is opened by another project"

Using Visual Studio 2005.
Not sure why this happens.

It did not go away with a simple closing of all files or process clean up or even re-boot.

The only way I could solve it was by these moving the (refering) project to enitrely different folder and copying back.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by Kumar July 09, 2009 @ 9:34 pm

I'm using ASP.NET MVC web application (VS.Net 2008), when I switch to form design mode, the IDE is going to unresponsive mode. I'm forced to kill it using ctrl +ALt+Delete.

But I'm able to debug the application without any issues.

The IDE doesn't even show up any error.

Quick help will be appreciated.

Thanks,
NKumar.

re: A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET realated Bugs
by gc July 13, 2009 @ 1:19 pm

I am having the same problem as Digvijay Khairnar regarding comments. They get automatically deleted, when I switch between Design and Source view. Does anyone have a solution for this?

# computer file recovery
by computer file recovery July 19, 2009 @ 5:09 pm

Backing up files continuously is the first defense against data loss, but the software will recover lost, fragmented, deleted, or destroyed files before they are written over with new ones. If you lose an important file, data recovery software can find it for you, but only if you realize your error before the computer uses that space. If new data replaces the lost data, the software will not be able to work properly.

# A number of annoying Visual Studio 2008 realated Bugs
by DMWCincy October 23, 2009 @ 12:32 pm

A few VS 2008 SP1 issues I'm seeing.

1)When adding references into a asp.net project VS mess up the tags inside <assemblies></assemblies>. I think it overwrites the </assemblies> tag and does not replace. I ended up having to type in the references myself
2)When using VS for a SSIS package, the GUI does not draw the various objects in your task or data flow tab. All you see is the text and the lines between the objects. You have to restart VS to correct this issue.
3)When inside a SSIS package, if you change a name of a package and forget to save the project you will see the package with the old name when you open the project again. You can't edit or rename the file since its already been rename or edited. You have to remove the package and add the package back in from the filesystem to get it back into the project.
4)Funny SSIS bug. if you have objects inside a For Each Loop and you grab the For Each object and move it a pixel or two and hold onto the window, the For Each Loop will start to and continue to scroll downwards. All you see by your mouse is just the outline of the box. When you let it go the object snaps back into the correct place.