I’m pretty pissed off at the latest in the mess I’m seeing on Vista with Visual Studio 2005. I’ve mentioned that I’ve had lots of problems with Intellisense not working until I switch into design view and back which is pretty annoying. Annoying but workable.

But now, I have a whole new set of issues related apparently to Web Application Projects under Vista. I’ve been working for the last couple of days with some code in WAP and I constantly get this error from Visual Studio in the designer:

C:\projects2005\WebLog\Admin\ReferrerSummary.aspx: ASP.NET runtime error: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt. 

This pops up consistently when I open a new form in the designer with Web Application projects and it shows up int he Error list. This is a design time compile error. This seems pretty harmless, but at the same time I’ve noticed that Visual Studio is refusing to load any of my custom controls onto a form. I have the Automatic Toolbox Section with all of my custom controls that live in another project. All the controls show on the toolbox, if I drop anything from that toolbar on the form it fails with the lovely error:

Control cannot be created because Visual Studio cannot find the controls type in the assembly.

Aha, but the type is there. In fact if I exit Visual Studio, come back in open the form right away, then drop the control (without recompiling) it all works fine. Of course the controls all work fine when the app is run, so this is something designer specific.

It works for a while until at some point later it doesn’t work again in the same VS.NET session. The behavior varies some – sometimes I get a dialog that won’t let me drop the control, at other times I get to drop the control but it gives me the generic error box for the control in which it proclaims that VS can’t find a requires support assembly which in fact does exist in the BIN directory.

When it’s in this ‘fucked up’ mode everything is a drag in the designer literally. The designer gets unbearably slow – it takes something like 10 seconds to change a property value and this is a simple form and not a big project.

Something is screwed up and I’ve seen this behavior in two completely separate Vista installs (Beta 2 and now in RC1). At this point I’m just not using the damn designer any more at all and am just hand coding. Even at the best of times when things work the Web Designer is such a dog it gets more in the way than anything else.

There’s more: Visual Studio crashes EVERY SINGLE time I exit it. Sometimes it also crashes for no apparent reason at all while it’s sitting idly in the background… this is more of a nuisance, but what the heck is going on that is making VS so unstable?

Is anybody else seeing any of this or is it just my bad karma? <g> Maybe we can compare notes and see if there's a common thread if others are seeing the same thing...

I'm wondering if it has something to do with a Dual Core machine or multiple processors in general? Drawing at straws...