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Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1


:P
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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...

Posted in ASP.NET  Visual Studio  Bugs  

The Voices of Reason


 

Andreas Kraus
September 27, 2006

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

Visual Studio 2005 is not yet Vista compatible. In the SP1 Release Post this is mentioned:

The second thing that I’d like to discuss is our support for Windows Vista, which is due to release in the coming months. Ensuring that VS2005 works well on Windows Vista is a core goal of ours. Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will run on Vista but will likely have a few compatibility issues. We are working with the Vista team to understand those, to provide workarounds where possible and also work on providing you with a set of fixes beyond SP1.

scottgu
September 27, 2006

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

The read or write protected memory issue is a known issue with Vista RC1 that has been fixed in newer builds of Vista (this was not a VS issue - but rather an OS component causing it). This actually is unrelated to web application projects - you can run into it with both web-sites and web application projects.

As Andreas mentioned above, we are planning a separate servicing patch to specifically address VS issues on Vista (we deliberately didn't hold VS 2005 SP1 to include these because we didn't want to wait). VS does some pretty invasive things with processes (think what a debugger and profiler do), and so with the Vista changes around tightended security there are reasons why some things break or behavior changes for the worse. That is the reason we are planning a separate patch to fix anything found.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Rick Strahl
September 27, 2006

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

Scott how about those other issues (they may be related but). I remember you guys said a while back you couldn't duplicate the Intellisense issue.

The reason I say WAP specifically is that I've been running Vista since for several months now and this recent problem of controls not showing up and not being able to drop only occurs in WAP. It works fine regular projects. For the last few months I've been primarily working with stock projects so I didn't notice this particular issue until a few days ago.

Any word on when these Vista patches will come out? I suspect there are a lot of people running Vista at this point. And can anybody confirm seeing these same type of issues...

Michael Lyons
September 27, 2006

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

You can get VS2005 SP1 Beta from https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio. Unfortunately you need to fill in a form first then once they have accepted you you will be able to download it.

Rick Strahl
September 27, 2006

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

Michael, wow, I've completely missed that.

Do you know if this beta can be rolled back once installed?

Andreas Kraus
September 28, 2006

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

Rick, it's listed as Update of Visual Studio 2005 in Control Panel/Software. I see the button "remove" for the update item so I assume it's possible to remove it.

Tim Mackey
October 09, 2006

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

hi Rick
i would like to echo your complaints with WAP / VS 2005 in vista. it's dismal, my experience is very similar to yours, especially with regard to custom controls registered in web.config. the beta SP1 did nothing to help also. this is the one issue that has forced me to go back to using XP. i'm just going to wait a few more weeks until Vista RTM comes out and hopefully by then MS will fix some or all the compatibility problems with visual studio. it was really doing my head in!
according to this page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/windowsvista/faq/ MS aren't planning to release the "Vista Support Update" for VS 2005 until Q1 of 2007 so i could be waiting a while longer. i don't exactly envy their position from a dev perspective, but MS made a right hash of the whole web application projects thing. design support for WAP projects is also crap under XP in my experience.

i did find that SP1-beta fixed the crash-on-close problem under Vista. i have it set to run as administrator.

it is some comfort at least to see that someone else is seeing the same problems! cheers.

Bill Bassler
February 22, 2007

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

This problem is not limited to Vista. I know of several cases where a very similar/the same situation is exhibited from Visual Studio 2005 SP1 running on XP Pro for certain web site? projects. So what's the fix for this????? Re-opening the IDE does nothing!

Noli San Jose
December 17, 2007

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

Yes, I echo Bill's statement: I'm also having the same problem in my new XP machine, whereas the same project was working in another XP machine. This is happening now as I write this comment.

I hope this can be resolved soon.

Shannon McKenzie
March 27, 2008

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

I am having similar issues with Vista Ultimate and VC8 with SP1 AND the Vista update for VC8 with an active X control in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Seems VC8 cannot break into my code in debug mode at all (ignores any break points added). To make things more annoying, Internet Explorer restarts itself if there are any errors in the code preventing me from even attempting to break into the code.

Ken
April 23, 2008

# re: Web Application Projects and Visual Studio under Vista RC1

This stupid condition shows up on XP pro, SP3 and XP Home(albeit modified for IIS) SP3.

Does it freaking stink YES!! WHY dont they tell you what the OS service pack is going to mess up - instead of having to look at every app and see if the app is NOT compatible.

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