Visual Studio 2008 Locking Up June 30, 2009
Posted by kevinbe71 in Uncategorized.add a comment
I’ve been working on an ASP.NET MVC project and I ran into an annoying Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 bug. When viewing the markup of a particular page it would lock up as if a modal dialog was being displayed (i.e. you could click on Visual Studio and it would beep but no dialog could be viewed). It would only lock up after a few seconds of inactivity so it appears to be related to some background task that kicks in when the IDE is idle. In any case, if you’ve seen the behavior you may want to try to track down a stylesheet link… this could be the problem! I don’t know why, but removing this line stopped the lock up from occurring.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />
The problem is that you may need the css for the page to work correctly. If so, then you may have to remove it while you’re doing significant editing and then paste it back in when you’re done.
Update #1: This appears to be a general problem with CSS styling. If I go into the options page for “CSS Styling” in the “HTML Designer” section it also locks up.
Update #2: The problem turned out to be more extensive and I couldn’t even use the web form designer- it locked up in the same way. The good news is that I’ve solved the problem with a little bit of help from an MVP named Michael Taylor. He pointed me to a Connect posting that gave me a few clues about what could be causing the problem. In the end I tried quite a few things but I think the thing that worked was uninstalling MS Office related stuff: Office 2007 Trial Edition (that came bundled with my laptop) and Office 2003 Web Components. The Connect article was quite convoluted so I figured someone would benefit from me posting this here instead of referring to that URL. However, if you want to look at it the URL is: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=387285
