Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer

May 30, 2006 @ 9:11 pm

So, I'm hammering away in Visual Studio for the last two days working on a number of projects. Everything is fine. I'm running apps, modifying projects and solutions… Several instances of VS has been running for quite some time chugging along.

About an hour ago I did some major reworking of a fairly big project. I renamed a number of projects and ran some hairy refactoring on some of the code that renames a few widely used control classes and properties on those classes. The final step was to rename my projects and remove all the projects from the original solution.

Next stop – I want to add my renamed projects back into the solution. So I right click on the Solution in Solution Explorer and VS blows up with a GPF. So I try again. Boom. Ok, maybe the Solution file is hosed. I check the file - nothing obviously wrong there. So I open another completely different project (a WinForm project no less) – same thing. Boom immediately on right clicking on Solution Explorer.

I finally click on the Crash Debug option and get:

An unhandled exception of type 'System.IO.FileLoadException' occurred in Unknown Module.

Additional information: Could not load file or assembly 'StanPackage, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8013141A)

StanPackage????? WTF? How can a package all of a sudden in the middle of a working session screw up so bad it completely hoses VS.NET? This stuff was working without fail.

So I keep futzing around for 15 minutes turning off add-ins removing some recently installed packages like Script#, but nothing…

Finally I'm ready to throw up my hands and raving at the Microsoft hell house as I'm ready to cave in and uninstall and re-install VS.NET. I HATE doing that – it's a 2 hour affair easy.

But I try one last ditch effort: Reboot the machine. And surprise surprise after the reboot, the solution explorer works again.

So I'm between love and hate here <g>. I'm stoked I don't have to reinstall, but I'm royally pissed for having been thrown into a half an hour of screwing around for apparently nothing. What in the world could possibly screw up Visual Studio so bad that a reboot is required to right itself? And yes I checked to make sure there weren't hidden instances of VS running.

Visual Studio feels like a giant house of cards at times that can come crashing down at any moment.

Case in point – I recently tried to reopen some of my older SmartPhone projects, only to find that the Visual Studio.NET installer completely hosed the Smartphone and PocketPC installation on this machine. Mind you this was a completely clean machine at the time of install. A brand spanking new XP install that had just about nothing else installed it. And yet even on this pristine environment VS managed to mangle the smart device install. I had many, many problems of the exact same kind during the beta and reported all of them, and spent hours trying to figure out what wasn't right with a few folks from Microsoft. In the end I get the same crap in a release version. I call that disappointing.

As you might imagine, since I have an otherwise fairly stable install (or apparently not all that stable) I'm not terribly excited about trying to fix the install just to get the mobile stuff to work at this point. It can wait.

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# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Cato Antonsen May 31, 2006 @ 1:20 am

I've had similar problems myself. Actually so often that I as a rule reboots if Visual Studio missbehaves one way or another.

Btw, I guess ALL machines are fairly clean at the moment of install...? ;-)

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Rick Strahl May 31, 2006 @ 2:23 am

Cato, you must not install a lot of software <g>...

Usually my machines are pretty burnt up on various beta software, but my original VS.NET install and actually even to this moment the machine's been pretty clean of beta stuff (witht the exception of ATLAS bits and Script#). I can't say that's USUALLY the case for my machines <g>...

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Joe Brinkman May 31, 2006 @ 7:23 am

I have two machines. One is a heaping pile and the other is useable. I can't leave VS.Net 2003 running overnight on either machine without it slowly eating up all my memory. I have blow-ups at least once a day in 2003, but much less frequently in 2005. So while it is bad, 2005 is actually more stable for me than 2003.

Of course I did run into a CodeRush bug that can cause everything to just "disappear" during the middle of a certain refactoring. No error. No debug option. Just poof. So all told I have just learned to live with the warts... sad as that may sound.

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Steve from Pleasant Hill May 31, 2006 @ 7:46 am

There was a time when I used VS 2003 every day for 10 hours a day, and rarely (if ever) had problems.

This is probably because I don't usually install Beta-ware, and most importantly, I shut my machine off every night. I just don't trust MS software to return unused resources or to leave a clean "wake".

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Gabriel Lozano-Morán May 31, 2006 @ 5:03 pm

You are the only guy I know that has so many technical problems :-)

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Brad June 06, 2006 @ 7:46 am

I am one of the few developers I know that does not use any sort of ide/raid tool for my web development. This is one of the reasons why. I would always find my self dealing with little quirks in the app. Then there is the general slowness ect, even for a new machine.

I have been using the same text editor with syntax highlighting for about 6 years and a little over a year ago I started using nant(awesome tool).

I have had a few phone interviews ect in the past couple of years and some people are blown away(in a bad way) when I tell them I don't use VS. For some reason I think they believe VS IS .NET so if you don't use VS, you are not doing .NET.

Grrrr.. enough already.

BD

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Nickkou June 06, 2006 @ 9:13 pm

I get across in this forum while I was looking for a solution in my IIS problem which was tackle in this site. I'm evaluating VS 2005 then after installing I cannot access the property tab of my IIS. No problems, no error but its not coming or popping.

I just want to know if there is already a solution on this? I have reinstalled VS2003 but the problem is still there. I don't want to waste my day reinstalling everything.

Suggestion will be much and greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Nickkou

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Nickkou June 06, 2006 @ 9:32 pm

Sorry guyz, found the solution.

Cheers!

# DotNetSlackers: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by DotNetSlackers Latest ASP.NET News December 04, 2006 @ 11:00 am

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Tye March 08, 2007 @ 3:21 pm

I have never and *WILL* never use the .NET platform. I've never seen a .NET app work. They all crash and quite frankly I've yet to see any project created to thoroughly explain why I would/should use it.

So I'll as you this: You said you are working on "a number of .NET projects", could you give me an idea on why you decided to use .NET at all and what these projects entail. The idea of webservices and the .NET effort is not new, its just gotten confusing thanks to Microsoft.

With the release of Vista, are you going to continue this path to VS2005? Because VS2002, 2003 are not compatible with Vista, and VS2005 is only partially compatible. In fact, only visual studio 6 is fully compatible on Vista. (I still use VB6, because I detected the problems with .NET's fundamentals at its original launch.)

I am curious as to what people develop in .NET. The tech-sector is going through a stagnant period, and I believe .NET is one of the reasons. (A poor development tool to distract GOOD programmers with on going IDE bugs.)

Good luck to ya,

Explorations RPG System
explorerpg@comcast.net

# re: Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
by Rick Strahl March 08, 2007 @ 3:56 pm

Uhm, how about Web applications? You're building Web apps with VB6? Good luck with that <s>... COM? Are you kidding me?

"You've never seen a .NET App work" - you probably just don't know when you are actually using a .NET application. And yeah I've built plenty of them myself and know of many large and extremely well received .NET installations.

I say you see what you want to see Tye...