I'm wondering if there are any workarounds for this issue, as I am plagued by frequent crashes -- though it isn't clear whether the crashes are caused by Resharper, Xamarin Tools or the mixture of C# and F# projects.
When I restart Visual Studio and load a solution containing Xamarin Forms projects, the entire display locks up. After one to three minutes, I get a pop-up saying that an update for Xamarin for Visual Studio is available (Clicking on the pop-up has no effect, so I'm assuming this is a false positive). A few seconds after that, it attempts to connect to my Mac, which is often unsuccessful as I work on my laptop and that connection is only available when I'm at home.
Only when the connection to the Mac has failed am I able to interact with Visual Studio, and then, about 30% of the time, attempting to build, clean or rebulid simply results in a pop-up saying "The operation could not be completed". The only way to fix that is to restart Visual Studio, causing the whole grinding process to restart again.
Xamarin themselves have referred me to these forums. Obviously this is not a pure software question, so I'll try to distill this into specific answerable questions.
Is there a way to prevent the false positive that tells me a new version of Xamarin for Visual Studio is available when it clearly isn't?
Is there a setting that I can use in order to opt in to connecting to the Mac, rather than attempting to make a connection and killing startup time when I know in advance that the connection will not be made?
Has the build problem "This operation could not be completed" been reported anywhere? I haven't found any instances of this problem related to Xamarin or Resharper. But it is frequent.
Does this consistently happen? We've had this problem over the years, but it's gotten much better. Make sure all your machines are synced with the latest Stable update. If on Beta/Alpha, this is typical as we push builds often. The strange part is that you say it's trying to update Xamarin Studio, we actually don't ship Xamarin Studio for Windows anymore: https://www.xamarin.com/faq#xpq6. So it might be a good idea to uninstall a previous version of Xamarin Studio on Windows if it's there.
This is a good point. It's something that might need a small papercut bug filed. Feel free to log an issue here and I can coordinate the status: (https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Visual%20Studio%20Extensions). In the past I've seen a couple ways around this. 1) Make a seperate .sln that might be called .Windows which will only load Windows native projects (Android, UWP, etc). This way the step is skipped completely. 2) You can simply unload the iOS project until you need to reload the project and work on the iOS side. However I do agree there should be a project property/IDE setting that should say "Start Xamarin Mac Agent on Startup".
That error is really vague. We would need to gather some logs(log files can be gathered from %LOCALAPPDATA%\Xamarin\Log or using Help->Xamarin). This operation could not be completed typically has an error/exception following it like This operation could not be completed: Invalid Pointer. So we would need to dig into logs here and see if we can get a Stack Trace when it happens. I would also try deleting your .suo in the .vs hidden folder of your project directory.
I'm running Visual Studio 2013 Pro (RTM version) on my formatted PC (Windows 8.1 fresh install).
I don't know why, but Visual Studio 2013 Pro is very very slow! Slow for building, debugging, navigating in the IDE... my hard disk drive LED is not lighting up at all!
I'm on a little MFC (C++) project using the Boost library.
Any ideas?
It is something concerned with the graphics drivers. If you update them you will be fine.
Or you can disable the hardware graphics acceleration in Visual Studio according to these steps:
In Visual Studio, click "Tools", and then click "Options".
In the Options dialog box, navigate to the "Environment > General" section and clear the "Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance" check box. (Refer to the following screen shot for this step.)
Clear the "Use hardware graphics acceleration if available" check box to prevent the use of hardware graphics acceleration.
Select or clear the "Enable rich client visual experience" check box to make sure that rich visuals are always on or off, respectively. When this check box is selected, rich visuals are used independent of the computer environment. For example, rich visuals are used when you run Visual Studio locally on a rich client and over remote desktop.
References:
You experience performance issues, product crashes, or rendering issues in Visual Studio 2013
Try to set Current source control plug-in to None (menu Tools → Options → Source Control), if you are using the Microsoft Git provider, which seems to slow Visual Studio 2013 down more and more the larger the repository gets.
I had the whole Dojo Toolkit framework under source control using the Microsoft Git provider, and it got to the point where there were delays from the time I hit a key to the time the glyph would appear on the screen. That bad.
When/if you need Git again, you can switch to the TortoiseGit provider or Git-Extensions, both will work without slowdown. I like Git-Extensions, personally.
I too have struggled a bit with bad performance in Visual Studio 2013 (Premium). Pretty much the same issues as TS had. Slow navigation, scrolling, building... just about everything. Luckily I have manage to solve my own problem by disabling Synchronized Settings in Visual Studio.
Go to menu Tools → Options → Environment-Synchronized Settings and remove this option by unchecking the checkbox.
In the case of web applications, another cause of slow building and debugging (but not IDE navigation) could be the Browser Link feature.
I found that with this switched on, building would take 4 times longer and debugging was painful - after every postback, web pages would freeze for a few seconds before you could interact with them.
I was using a solution upgraded from Visual Studio 2012. Visual Studio 2013 also upgraded the .suo file. Deleting the solution's .suo file (it's next to the .sln file), closing and re-opening Visual Studio fixed the problem for me. My .suo file went from 91KB to 27KB.
I had the same problem and the only solution that worked for me was to follow the three steps presented below:
Clean the WebSiteCache folder (you may find it at
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache)
Clean the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder (find it at
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
Restart Visual Studio
What fixed it for me was disabling Git by setting Current source control plug-in to None in Visual Studio, menu Options → Source Control:
This issue seems to be because of uninstalling the SQL Server Compact edition (4.0).
I was having this issue, and it got fixed after installing the SQL Server Compact edition 4.0.
On closing Visual Studio 2013, I was getting a message to install SQL Server Compact edition as a C++ project needed some thing... can't put finger on anything.
Resolve this issue by installing Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0
I can advise an option like this.
CodeLens can be disabled like as at the picture. It gives a lot of performance goodness.
If you are debugging an ASP.NET website using Internet Explorer 10 (and later), make sure to turn off your Internet Explorer 'LastPass' password manager plugin. LastPass will bring your debugging sessions to a crawl and significantly reduce your capacity for patience!
I submitted a support ticket to Lastpass about this and they acknowledged the issue without any intention to fix it, merely saying: "LastPass is not compatible with Visual Studio 2013".
I had the same problem and all the solutions mentioned here didn't work out for me.
After uninstalling the "Productivity Power Tools 2013" extension, the performance was back to normal.
One more thing to check; for me it was Fusion logging.
I'd turned this on a very long time ago and more or less forgotten about it. Getting rid of the 5000+ directories and 1 GB of logged files worked wonders.
There is a good workaround for this solution if you are experiencing slowness in rendering the .cs files and .cshtml files.
Just close all the files opened so that the cache gets cleared and open the required files again.
Visual Studio Community Edition was slow switching between files or opening new files. Everything else (for example, menu items) was otherwise normal.
I tried all the suggestions in the previous answers first and none worked. I then noticed it was occurring only on an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application, so I added a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application, and this was fast.
After much trial and error, I discovered the difference was packages.config - If I put the Microsoft references at the top of the file this made everything snappy again.
Move the Microsoft* entries to the top.
It appears you don’t need to move them all - moving say <package id="Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure" has an noticeable effect on my machine.
As an aside
Removing all contents of the file makes it another notch faster too*
Excluding packages.config from Visual Studio does not fix the issue
A friend using Visual Studio 2013 Premium noticed no difference in either of these cases (both were fast)
UPDATE
It appears missing or incomplete NuGet packages locally are the cause. I opened the Package manager and got a warning 'Some NuGet packages are missing from this solution' and choose to Restore them and this sped things up. However I don’t like this as in my repository I only add the actual items required for compilation as I don’t want to bloat my repository, so in the end I just removed the packages.config.
This solution may not suit your needs as I prefer to use NuGet to fetch the packages, not handle updates to packages, so this will break this if you use it for that purpose.
For me, the problem was the Start page -- it was downloading content and causing Visual Studio to hang.
The only solution for me was to:
Kill the DevEnv process from Task Manager
Start Visual Studio in Safe Mode from the command line:devenv.exe /safemode
Go to menu Tools → Options, and select the Environment/Startup options
Choose "Show empty environment" for the startup action
Close Visual Studio
Restart normally
Running unit tests was slow. It was a ReSharper issue.
Menu ReSharper → Options → Environment → General ... Clear Caches
Menu Tools → Options → ReSharper → General ... Suspend Now
Close Visual Studio
Delete the .suo file.
Open Visual Studio again.
Re-enable ReSharper.
I also had an issue with a slow IDE.
In my case I installed
ReSharper
Npgsql (low chance to cause the problem)
Entity Framework Power Tools Beta 4
The following helped me a bit:
Disabled synchronization - menu Tools → Options → Environment-Synchronized Settings
Disabled plug-in selection - menu Tools → Studio → Options → Source Control.
Disabled Entity Framework Power Tools Beta 4 - menu Tools → Extensions and Updates
Uninstalled JetBrain's Resharper - WOW!! I am fast again!!
Change the Fusion Log Value to 0. It solved my issue.
This is the FusionLog key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion
Check ForceLog value (1 enabled, 0 disabled).
I was also facing this issue for quite long time. Below are the steps that I perform, and it works for me always:
Deleting the solution's .suo file.
Deleting the Temporary ASP.NET Files (You can find it at find it at %WINDOW%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
Deleting all breakpoints in the application.
Visual Studio 2013 has a package server running, and it was spending up to 2 million K of memory.
I put it to low priority and affinity with only one CPU, and Visual Studio ran much more smoothly.
Performance Explorer
Have you been using menu Analyze → Performance and Diagnostics? I have! It's awesome! But you may want to clean up.
Open the Performance Explorer. If you collapse all of the items in there, select all, then you can right click and do Delete.
My solution opens faster and is in general running much faster now.
Also you may notice changes to your sln file as shown. For me, this section was deleted from the sln.
GlobalSection(Performance) = preSolution
HasPerformanceSessions = true
EndGlobalSection
In Visual Studio 2015 Community edition, I've experienced a very (very) slow IDE after changing the "Environment Font" on menu Tools → Options... → Fonts and Colors.
Reverting this options back to the default value ("automatic") solved it immediately.
I had similar problems when moving from Visual Studio 2012 → Visual Studio 2013. The IDE would lock up after almost every click or save, and building would take several times longer. None of the solutions listed here helped.
What finally did help was moving my projects to a local drive. Visual Studio 2012 had no problems storing my projects on a network share, but Visual Studio 2013 for some reason couldn't handle it.
I had a Visual Studio 2013 installed, and it was running smoothly. At some point it started to get sluggish and decided to install Visual Studio 2015. After install, nothing changed and both versions were building the solution very slow (around 10 minutes for 18 projects in solution).
Then I have started thinking of recently installed extensions - the most recent installed was PHP tools for Visual Studio (had it on Visual Studio 2013 only). I am not sure how can an extension affect other versions of Visual Studio, but uninstalling it helped me to solve the problem.
I hope this will help others to realize that it is not always Visual Studio's fault.
I added "devenv.exe" as an exclusion to Windows Defender. This solved my problem completely. People can try this as their first try.
I have the same problem, but it just gets slow when trying to stop debugging in Visual Studio 2013, and I try this:
Close Visual Studio, then
Find the work project folder
Delete .suo file
Delete /obj folder
Open Visual Studio
Rebuild
None of the suggestions worked for me, but I did solve my problem. I had tried most of the other recommendations before coming to the following solution.
My Scenario/Problem:
Using Visual Studio 2017 with ReSharper Ultimate. Keyboard input in the IDE got super slow as others have described. The last change I made to my solution was to add a new web site project, so I looked into that. After trying a lot of things, I tried adding a second web site project, so I could try to replace the first one, and Visual Studio just tanked after that. It wouldn't even load the solution anymore.
My Solution:
I forced Visual Studio closed and then I removed the newly added web site project(s) from the .sln file using Notepad. After saving and starting Visual Studio, my solution loaded quickly and everything seemed to be back to normal. I added a new Web Site with a slightly different configuration (see the thinking below), and the problem did not present itself again.
My Thinking:
I think the problem stemmed from creating the new web site project and using a file system path to a network share that is hosted in Azure. I'm working over VPN which tends to slow things down, and I occasionally experience various routing problems with some services, so my problem/solution might be a bit of a snowflake. I changed the file system path to be a local repository and will publish the files as needed which seems like a much better way to go.
I had a Visual Studio behavior where the typing was slow for my HTML files. Previously when I installed, I guessed that because my HTML files were generic HTML that the need to install any web development tools from the workload component of the installer was unnecessary. I went back and installed this bit and Visual Studio behavior became as I expected it.
This already has a bunch of answers here, but a general way to easily boost Visual Studio is to clear your temp files.
Press the Windows Key and R, and enter 'temp'. Press enter, and provide any administrator permission if you need to. Then press Control A to select all, and hit the Del key. Remember to provide any administrator permissions, and if 'the item is already in use' then just press skip.
After this, Press Windows Key and R again, but this time type '%temp%'. Repeat the previous steps in the new directory.
Finally, empty the recycle bin.
This might not help a ton, but it should boost general performance.
I've searched high and low for the answer to this and can find nothing on it. I have installed VS 2010 pro edition on a virtual machine running MS XP Pro. After connecting to my database, I can see all the tables, stored procedures, and functions just fine in the list. However, when I rick-click on any of them, the options to create new/edit/run any of them are missing.
This is not the first time I've set up VS 2010. I got a new laptop so reinstalled everything. I changed no settings the first time I've set this up, and none this time. I set up the connection to the databases the same way each time, and even looked at my old connection settings while I set up this installation. The old installation had all of the right-click options, but this one does not. I have tried going to Tools -> Import and Export Settings -> Reset all settings and tried General Development Settings, Visual C# Development Settings, and Web Development as the default collection of settings. None of these worked.
I've looked through the settings and found nothing for the right-click menu. It almost seems as if the database connection is open in a "read only" mode, but there doesn't seem to be a setting for that, so I don't think that is the case. If anyone knows of any way to get these options to show up, I would greatly appreciate the input. Thanks in advance.
After I installed Visual Studio 2010 (Ultimate), I accidentally uninstalled the SQL Server Data Tools which were installed together with VS, and after reinstalling them (by repairing the VS installation) the missing context menue options were back again.
Desperate to resolve this, I played around with the connection more. I had originally chosen Microsoft SQL Server as the data source, and .NET Framework Data Provider for OLE DB as the Data Provider. Evidently, the data provider was wrong. After choosing .NET Framework Data Provider for SQL Server, it worked and I could see all of my right-click menu options.
I have VS 2013 Ultimate installation. Along this version I installed SSTD BI. Everything was working perfect until I got the same issue. Right-click on tables or other folders displays only three options: copy, refresh, property. The tricky thing is that it's impossible to uninstall SSTD BI in Control Panel or install SSTD BI on top of previous installation. What helped me is repair installation of VS2013. Start your installation file and chose repair instead of installation. Couple hours and it's back to work.
I downloaded SSTD from here and it fixed my missing context menus
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/mt186501
Just installed VS2010 express for Windows Phone last night. Install went smoothly. It creates a project, compiles, and deploys the app to the emulator.
Here's the problem: When I try to "Add Reference" through the Project menu, I do not get the Add Reference dialog box. Same thing if I right click References in the solution explorer and click Add Reference. That's not all. "File...Open" and "File...Open Project" also fail to throw up an open file dialog box. When attempting any of these actions, the IDE quickly loses and regains focus. Even pressing a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+O) causes the IDE to quickly lose and regain focus, but no open file dialog box appears.
This is what I have tried, not particularly in this order:
1. Turned off UAC
2. Monitored file and registry access using Process Monitor during a File...Open operation. File activity showed mostly "SUCCESS" with a few "FAST IO DISALLOWED" and a few "INVALID DEVICE REQUEST" results. Registry activity showed mostly "SUCCESS" with some "NAME NOT FOUND" and a few "BUFFER OVERFLOW" results.
3. Created a new, clean Windows account to run the IDE from
4. Forced a test project to add a reference to "System.Xml.Linq" by editing the ".csproj" project file. Project failed to load in the IDE.
I don't have these problems at all on 2 other Windows 7 computers with VS2010 C# express beta 2 installed. One machine is 32bit and the other 64bit, both Home Premium edition.
My system: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64bit
Other Visual Studio products installed: VS2008 C# express, VS2008 C++ express
One other thing to note: Several months ago I installed the non-phone distribution of VS2010 C# express beta 2, and I had the same exact problems. Back then I chalked it up to being beta and went back to VS2008 C# express, where I do not have these issues.
Matt, if you're still reading this post, I have a solution:
Do you have the Tablet PC Input Service disabled? Enable and start it. This was suggested to me over on the MSDN forums, and it worked for me immediately. I have this service disabled, but I turned it on, fired up VS2010, and it just worked right off. I confirmed this solution by turning the service off again, starting VS2010, and noting that it breaks once again. Turned the service on once more, started VS2010, and it works perfectly. Amazing.
I do not think it's acceptable to require this particular service just for VS2010 to function correctly. Hopefully they fix this in the inevitable service pack. FYI, I had this service disabled because I turn off all services I don't require. So now I have two "wisptis.exe" tasks eating up ~8MB of RAM and starting every time I turn on the PC. Or I can shut the service off again and just resort to my previous workaround. haha
Here is a work around.
Just run wisptis.exe from command line and start the visual studio.
If you don't wanna run each and every time you restarts the computer,then just put wisptis.exe in a .bat file and move it to the startup folder,so that it will be automatically executed on each and every startup.
EDIT 1 :- Or else just press 'WIN'+'R' and type 'wisptis' and press 'Enter'.
I experienced the exact same problem. I'm running VS2010 Express on Windows 7 (x64). Re-enabling the "Tablet Input" service "fixed" the problem.
VS2010 has always worked fine, and then suddenly for no apparent reason "ctrl-O", "Add Reference", "Open Project", and other similar functions stop working.
No amount of repair/uninstall/reinstall would fix the problem.
I always disable the "Tablet Input" service on Win 7, because I use a Wacom tablet, and dislike the visual notification of (tablet) mouse clicks this service causes. VS2010 has so far been working fine in this setup with Tablet input service disabled, but then suddenly the problem arose, and I had to re-enable the "Tablet Input" service to make it go away.
I have another computer with the exact same setup - Win 7 (x64), VS2010 Express, Wacom table, and disabled "Tablet Input" service - and here VS2010 is still working just fine. Both computers also have almost identical software installed and updates installed, so I still have no idea where the difference lies.
Has anyone had more luck in finding the root cause?
I also use Power Toys, but I have not been able to correlate this installation with the problematic behavior of VS2010.
I'm having close to the same issue with the exception that my New | Project dialog works, but Add Reference and Ctrl + O just cause the interface to lose focus and regain focus without every launching the dialog. I have tried running devenv /ResetAddin and devenv /ResetSkipPkgs, but neither helped. I have UAC turned off as well. I don't experience the issue with VS2008.
Here's my setup:
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RTM
Visual Studio 2008 Team System Developer Edition with Team Explorer 2008 and VS2008 SP1
The only addins I run:
GhostDoc
.NET Reflector
Other Related Products I run:
Microsoft Expression Studio 3
SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition with SP1
tonight I uninstalled the VS2010 Express beta 2+phone tools and installed the now final RTM VS2010 Express C#. It STILL had the problem! For kicks, I tried importing a VS2008 project because it has some extra references in the project, and I was curious how they would be handled. The project imported successfully, but compiled with errors that it couldn't find a reference for a SyndicationFeed object, even though the reference for it was successfully added to the References list upon import. I remove the reference (System.ServiceModel.Web), hold my breath, and try to Add Reference one more time. Amazingly, the Add Reference dialog pops up, I add the reference back, recompile and bingo. File...Open and File...Open Project now throw up the proper file open dialogs as well.
To be sure this isn't a fluke only related to importing an old project, I shut down VS2010, start it back up, create a brand new project and try Add Reference. It works still. The File/Project dialogs also show up. I have no idea how, but importing a VS2008 project apparently made VS2010 correct itself on my machine.
Thank you for replying to my post. After hours of Googling over the past few days, your post is the first I've seen of anyone else having this issue besides me.
I found a workaround, but it's annoying having to do this:
1. Create a new project
2. Close VS2010, don't bother saving the new project
3. Start VS2010 again, and everything works as it should. I can access the Add Reference dialog, and I can do a File...Open and Open Project from the menu and toolbar.
If I close VS2010 and start it again, it is broken once more. Performing my workaround fixes it again for that session.
Still looking for a permanent solution.
I finally figured out a work-around. If I temporarily disable the Power Tools, the original Add References dialog opens fine. After adding my references, I can enable the Power Tools again.