Every time I close a solution, or start debugging, or stop debugging, everything except the main code tab auto-hides.
This includes anything docked to the right - like the Solution Explorer, Properties, etc. (for me at least). It also includes everything docked to the bottom - like the Find Results, Output, Immediate Window, Error List, etc. (again, for me at least).
I cannot find a setting that keeps these docked items open. I find it very annoying that I have to keep re-opening them and would like to find a more permanent solution.
I recently updated from VS 2013. It did not do this.
Is there a setting? Is it something else? I am running on Windows Server 2012 R2. I open Visual Studios as the Administrator.
To Optimize Visual Studio Startup Time, VS2017 has introduced new feature Manage Visual Studio Performance under help menu. Using this option, one can override startup behavior of tool window like error list, package manager console etc.
For more information, refer Optimize Visual Studio Startup Time.
I am running into a frustrating issue with Visual Studio in which every time I open or refresh a solution, Visual Studio locks up for about 30 seconds and then I am met with this error
This happens about 10 times, so it takes about five minutes to get a working instance of Visual Studio.
I eventually traced this to entries in Server Explorer to which I don't have access. These seem to be auto-populated from connection string entries in various Web.config files throughout the solution. If I comment out the connection strings, the solution loads fine. But this is not an ideal solution because I don't want to commit these changes to source control.
Is there a way to stop this auto-population of Server Explorer? I don't remember this ever happening in previous version of Visual Studio, so maybe it's new in 2015?
Using VS 2013 Community Edition (yay!), whenever I start it it opens the Performance Explorer window, which I do not require. I opened it once, and it seems to have saved this layout as default.
I have tried saving the setup without that window, locally overwriting the "CurrentSettings.vssettings", and if I expicitly reload the settings from there it is correct; however, if I close VS and open it again with a solution - Performance Explorer is back again.
Any ideas how/where to save my default settings?? Thanks!
This bug appears to have existed for sometime, across many different versions (read comments)
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/749636/performance-explorer-window-is-always-opened-when-vs-is-started-and-mr-soln-opens
Phill's link shows the Microsoft Bug, but you can get around this issue.
Go to the Visual Studio Project's folder
Close Visual Studio!!!
Remove the following file types: Performance Reports *.vsp and Performance Sessions *.psess
Re-open the Solution, you'll get an error saying Visual Studio could not find the Performance Reports for the Project. Do not worry; the Solution will still load.
Close the solution.
Re-open the solution - the Performance Explorer tab will be finally gone!
I have a really weird problem, be interested in some pointers
We have a website that we have coded from Visual Studio 2003 -> Visual Studio 2010. We are now looking at moving to 2013.
The website is in IIS, when I navigate to it using IE it works. When VS2013 is -open-, not running, but has the project open we get a weird effect where the contents of the website gets duplicated by 3, its as if there are 3 iframes on the page, all with a copy of the same web site.
I close VS2013 and it goes back to normal
So, just to be clear, we don't even have to run the web site from within VS2013, just the project being open is enough to cause the weird effect
We use subversion as as far as I can tell no files have been modified when VS2013 is open
Any suggestions?
Thanks
It's Browser Link that's doing it! If you switch off Browser Link it works.
The source shows some extra script entries before the final tag but other than that the whole source is duplicated.
We don't need Browser Link and I don't have reflection capabilities on Asp.Net source so as to why that's for some one else to determine, I noticed a few people complaining when I searched on it so it may be something that just gets fixed in a future version
We have a really big solution with more than 200 projects and thousands of files. Despite of that the solution used to load pretty quickly in Visual Studio 2010 as well as 2012. However, after copying the whole SVN repository to another location, loading and closing the solution suddenly took extreeeemly long. (I am talking about 30-60 minutes here!)
I found a solution myself and I wanted to share it here, hoping that it might save someone quite a few hours of research and staring at the "Preparing solution..." dialog.
When inspecting the devenv.exe process with Process Monitor, I found out that it is pretty busy with accessing the .svn directory. Here is what I did (and this somehow solved the problem):
Kill Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
Disable AnkhSvn as Source Control plugin (Tools->Options->Source Control->Plug-in Selection->None)
Disable "Document Well 2010 Plus" (VS2010) or "Custom Document Well" (VS2012) in Productivity Power Tools (Tools->Options->Productivity Power Tools) - I read that somewhere and it might have helped as well...
Close Visual Studio
Delete the solution's *.suo file. This is located in the same folder as the solution itself. NOTE: You will lose several settings for your solution, like currently opened files, breakpoints, bookmarks, current solution configuration & platform (e.g. Debug x86) etc.
Restart Visual Studio
Load the solution - it was much faster now!
Close Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
Re-enable AnkhSvn and the "Document Well"
Restart Visual Studio
Open the solution - it was still loaded in seconds!
I do not know which of these steps actually solved the problem. Probably, not all these steps are required, but I did not want to reproduce the problem to find out which steps may be omitted. :)
None of those helped me, what I did... I watch with ProcMon of sysinternals, filtering for devenv, and I saw a lot of entries of fussionlog. I had enabled fussionlog for debugging purposes some weeks before and didn't think in disabling it. I just had to disable fussionlog and the solution opened faster.
You can open the Visual Studio in the Safe Mode, and then check your plugin and source control settings after opening the project.
Safe Mode means "Starts Visual Studio, loading only the default environment and services."
How :
devenv /SafeMode
Or according to your path
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /SafeMode
source : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241278.aspx
In my case, the following worked without any of the intervening steps suggested:
Kill Visual Studio.
Start Visual Studio directly (i.e., not from the .sln file).
Then, from within Visual Studio, open the solution.
In my case this was all it took to make the problem solution load quite quickly, without the need for me to change any settings or delete any files.
fwiw, I realize this is a late entry, but I found that simply removing (deleting) my large number of breakpoints resolved the excessive load time and compile time.
This action reduced the size of the .suo file from 214MB to 977KB. Let VS handle the .suo file itself.
Compiling and loading now takes < 1 minute instead of 5-10 minutes for a solution with 35 projects. Visual Studio 2012 Pro, update 4.
None of the other answers worked for me. CI compile times were fine, but loading my solution in Visual Studio was taking almost two minutes. VS would then operate just fine until I closed and opened the solution the next time. Different versions of VS all showed the same problem and both safe mode and deleting the suo didn't help.
I ended up following the advice in http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2014/04/30/156156.aspx to use Windows Performance Recorder to instrument VS and find the problem. By looking in Windows Performance Analyzer under the "CPU Usage (Sampled)" section and adding the "Stack (Frame Tags)" column, I was able to dig into the usage of devenv.exe.
Turns out the hot path by count had Microsoft.VisualStudio.Platform.WindowManagement.ni.dll 23 calls down, and below that eventually Microsoft.VisualStudio.ServerExplorer.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Data.Package.dll. That pointed me to look in Server Explorer in the UI and open the Data Connections tab. There I found hundreds of mistakenly added connections that came from the debug web.config's ConnectionString section. Removing those from web.config reduced the load of that individual project from 90+ seconds to almost instant.
I have a different cause for the slow loading of the projects.
My situation is utilizing Git and found that even switching branches was slower than it should be with project load.
Solution: Run Visual Studio as Administrator
Reason: Something with the Corporate laptop is not providing the needed Git tool access (it doesn't recognize that a git repository is in use).
I have not seen any issues with Git or my personal access to any of the project files or Git objects.
I tried the above, but it didn't solve my problem.
Here's how I got around this problem, hopefully it will work for some of you as well:
Open Visual Studio 2013 with no solution.
Create a new C# Console application and save it.
Close Visual Studio.
Reopen the Console solution created in step 2.
Close Visual Studio.
Reopen the solution that was previously hanging on the Preparing Solution dialogue. Mine opened right away, no more hanging.
Using Visual Studio 2015, I ended up creating a new solution, adding the existing projects.
Deleting the *.suo from gehho's answer helped in the past, but didn't help me in this case. There's also another .suo file in a hidden .vs folder at the root of the solution.
There are other answers here for Visual Studio 2015 Visual Studio 2015 is extremely slow
For my case it was due to TFS issue. It thinks that there are more than 5000 pending changes.
The fix is to force TFS to recheck. Go to Team Explorer -> Source Control Explorer and do "Get Latest" on the projects that have pending changes. For things that are already matching TFS, Visual Studio will actually not download anything to your PC. For things that are different with TFS, Visual Studio will let you know and ask you to reconcile the difference.
This is VS 2019 Professional.
In my case there were <import ...> entries in the project files that pointed to
paths no longer available making the loading of the solution hang indefinitely without any form of information give (Shame on Microsoft!).
I encountered this problem only recently (Mar 2021), using VS 2019. It literarily takes 30+ seconds to load the file (each).
It only effects the Layout files. I believe it could be to do with the links within the files. I have not had time to investigate them.
However, I am writing this to suggest that regardless of the cause of the problem, a simple solution is to right click on the file and open it with Notepad to get your work done.