While updating or uninstalling Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension Preview the step "Microsoft Visual Studio Preparation" is taking enormous amount of time. I may say it gets stuck.
My suspicion is the installer (Windows one, not the extension itself, since it is getting modified--updated or uninstalled) is making changes to the registry.
VS registry entries are too many to investigate them one by one. Re-installing VS is not an option. (I have VS 2013 Ultimate on Windows 8.1.)
So, my question is: is there any tool to repair, optimize, clean, or otherwise modify registry (VS portions only) to get the process quicker? Or some sensitive keys that need to be explored? Seems like there are timeouts involved? (Although I do not find this quite reasonable...)
Or, if I am wrong about the registry, Is there another reason for this symptomatic behaviour? UAC issues? NTFS security? Other?
Any advice?
Thanks.
I just solved a similar issue with installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 3. It was taking over an hour on the "Microsoft Visual Studio Preparation" step.
I fired up Process Monitor from Sysinternals and realised the installer was busy logging to C:\FusionLog. Killed the update process, changed the relevant settings under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion to turn off assembly bind logging, rebooted to make sure the new settings were recognised, and voila, the "Microsoft Visual Studio Preparation" step took on the order of 10's of seconds.
I hope this helps with your problem because this was extremely frustrating for me. I wasted most of my work day on this.
When "Microsoft Visual Studio Preparation" is shown, the installer is running "devenv /setup" to register any packages and templates. That can take a long time. Though it's not ideal, it's not a bug; it's how Visual Studio works.
See this blog posting: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/heaths/archive/2014/01/21/upgrading-visual-studio-2013-update-to-a-newer-update-may-be-slow.aspx
It basically says there's no workaround to save time, just sit tight:
"There is no current workaround that will save time. You might consider starting the upgrade before taking a lunch or heading out for the day."
It also says the issue has been resolved for future versions of VSUpdate and Visual Studio.
Try to block the antivir activity. As for me, it significantly raised the speed.
Related
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.
My Visual Studio began crashing at start-up. In my search for finding a remedy, I found these two suggestions, but neither worked for me:
Launching Visual Studio while running in safe mode, and
Running repair on Visual Studio.
However, I found that if I logged into a different Windows account, Visual Studio was able to run from that account without crashing.
Here is an error code that that I observed in the crash report:
LCID: 1033
Can anyone provide a solution for returning my Visual Studio to working order?
For me it turned out to be the plugin that GitExtensions installed into Visual Studio 2013.
-- UPDATE: try this before uninstalling GitExtensions
#Enceradeira proposed in the comments to uncheck the Show current branch in Visual Studio option. In GitExtensions, you get there via Tools -> Settings -> Appearance:
-- END OF UPDATE
After uninstalling GitExtensions and reinstalling it with all VS plugin unselected my VS runs smoothly again.
I even put together a blog post about this issue because it bugged me so much.
Since you're able to run with another user login, something may be wrong with your local settings, you can try to reset them: devenv /resetsettings in Start menu -> Run.
Warning: this will restore visual studio to default settings.
In my case VS used to crash on a single solution. I resolved the problem by deleting the respective solutions's user file: SolutionName.suo
My colleague recently experienced a problem with Visual Studio 2013 crashing on start-up. Unfortunately, we found that the approach recommended in the answer by #Arun M did not solve the problem:
devenv.exe /ResetSettings
...however, using a different command line argument did:
devenv.exe /ResetUserData
An easy way to run devenv.exe is via the Visual Studio command prompt; on Windows 10, it can be found here:
Start Button => All Apps => Visual Studio 2013 => Visual Studio Tools =>
VS2013 x86 Native Tools Command Prompt
For more about these command line arguments for devenv.exe, see this answer to this related question: How do I truly reset every setting in Visual Studio 2012?. ⚠ In particular, please note the cautionary statement in that answer about the /ResetUserData command line argument!
Try to run VS as administrator. That's necessary in my case.
If coincident to these Visual Studio crashes you are getting "Heap corruption" (Exception code: 0xc0000005) errors in your Windows Application log (Faulting module name: WindowsCodecs.dll), here is something worth checking into: A faulty WIC component within Expression Blend can cause ALL versions of Visual Studio to crash upon launch, as well as cause Internet Explorer to crash upon visiting many, if not most sites. Even though Microsoft distributes this component, they call it a "non-Microsoft component". As such, a Visual Studio reinstall won't fix this,, an OS reinstall over existing Windows installation won't fix this, and a system file integrity check won't detect it.
If my case, the misbehaving codec was "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression\Common\Imaging\4.0.360.0\PSDCodec.dll", and simply unregistering this component got my Visual Studio working again from consistent startup launch crashes.
I post this in hopes this solution to one source of Visual Studio crashing might save others from the $500 Microsoft support incident fee and week of downtime this caused me.
I just changed the windows language in the bottom right to "EN", then started as admin. And it worked, interesting..
I had the very strange phenomenon that both Visual Studio 2010 and 2013 on a Windows 7 machine crashed when run in a remote desktop session, started from a Windows 10 pc. Debugging the crash showed a CultureNotFound exception. It was caused by regional settings on the Windows 10 pc, which could not be translated in something understood by Windows 7. I had language English(Belgium) with an Azerty keyboard. I added and selected English(UK) with an Azerty keyboard and the crashes disappeared. No other programs suffered from this.
For me it was being caused by Web Essentials and I was able to resolve by disabling it, restarting VS, enabling it back , restart again. Works now.
I had a crash on startup (or soon after startup, before opening any solution) occurring in git2-msvstfs.dll, caused by placing a 3GB temp file into a directory within my solution. Deleting the file fixed it.
Once I accidentally pressed a random key combination (maybe something like ctrl+', but I didn’t realize I was holding ctrl down so I forgot what keys I hit by the time I realized something bad had happened) that resulted in VS Professional 2017 15.3.5 crashing within half a minute. After relaunching, I found that VS would be interactive for a few seconds before it would crash within half a minute. It was really too fast for me to try to figure out what I had accidentally activated or for me to disable it before VS would crash. Also, it would even crash if I didn’t open any solution, so I figured it was not something that deleting a .vs (per project/solution Solution Explorer/open files state) folder would fix.
To fix, I followed Arun M’s comment and renamed my %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_3f4d04be folder. You will need to adjust the path for the edition/version of VS that is crashing. On my machine, I think 15.0_3f4d04be is Professional and 15.0_0fed6c59 is VS Community Edition. You’ll probably have to guess based on the folder’s modification timestamp which is probably going to reflect the date you last used that edition of VS.
After renaming the versioned dotfolder, VS launched without crashing. It started with default settings but automatically restored some of my settings through the cloud sync stuff after a minute of running and it even remembered my account information so I didn’t need to sign in.
I did not need to rename my %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VSCommon folder (which Arun M had also suggested).
I had a similar problem, both VS2015 and VS2013 would crash at startup. Tracked it down to an application I installed which put .net 4.7.2 on the system. Once i removed that app, removed .net, and reinstalled .net 4.6, Visual Studio started working again.
I have problem with Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 64-bit. After some time of work VS starts consuming ~50% CPU and UI responding slows down. When I close VS then UI disappear but process stay.
When I forgot to kill those hung processes at the end of day, I will end up with numerous devenv.exe processes.
I have reinstall Visual Studio and reinstall Windows and ended up with the same problem... doesn't change anything. Please help. :/
Remove and/or uninstall all third-party Visual Studio add-ins and extensions. Disabling is not good enough.
Visual Studio 2010 relies heavily on graphics. Therefore:
Update your video driver.
Turn off "Enable rich client visual
experience"
Turn off "Use Hardware graphics acceleration if
available"
There are also temporary files that Visual Studio uses that may need to be cleared out.
Clear out your %temp% folder.
Clear out %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache
Clear out %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ProjectAssemblies
Your project and solution user settings may be corrupt due to so many "crashes".
Delete .user and .suo files (you will lose the startup project, bookmarks, breakpoints, and other user settings specific to projects and solutions.)
Begin where you began before - it may seem overkill but this is the only way to be sure we are addressing everything short of hardware issues.
Reinstall Windows - make sure you are using a validly licensed copy, and patch the hell out of it before installing Visual Studio.
Note: I doubt it is a GPU driver issue, but it never hurts to use the most up to date driver and this is the place to do it right after a fresh OS install.
Install Visual Studio .Net 2010 but do not start it up. Let it get the frameworks installed fresh.
Use Windows Update to install the VS 2010 SP1 patch, and any/all patches for .Net frameworks.
Make an images for yourself right here so you have something to build from if you need to try this again. It will save you lots of time.
Fire up Visual Studio, and test your closing before installing anything else.
If it does not work here, there's likely some conflict between PC hardware and window OS, and you should try to find this symptom in other applications to get more info.
Here's what i would be looking for:
Does it happen EVERY TIME?
Does it happen after you debug your project ? does it happen for ALL projects?
Does it also happen when you don't load any projects? (simply start the IDE and wait).
Does it happen after a debug session of your application? maybe the application is not closed properly?
Do you have any other apps running at the same time that may cause this? try reproducing with a minimal set of apps/services running.
What are you doing exactly when it starts freezing ? anything in particular?
I would try to get 2-3 memory dumps at the time of hanging, post it here as well as to MSFT people. That would be a good start.
I've been running Visual Studio 2010 (the official release) for some time now. Lately, VS will crash 10+ times during my 8 hour work day. In VS2008, crashes were common when working with large Xaml files, and while I experience some of that with VS2010, crashes occur when debugging, starting the debugger, stopping the debugger, and other random times when editing code.
I've looked through the problem reports, and the one I've found that occurs most frequently is:
Description
Faulting Application Path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe
Problem signature
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: devenv.exe
Application Version: 10.0.30319.1
Application Timestamp: 4ba1fab3
Fault Module Name: ntdll.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7600.16385
Fault Module Timestamp: 4a5bdb3b
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0002e23e
I'm running Windows 7 (x64). Hoepfully someone has come across this problem and has found a solution. I plan on reinstalling VS2010. Hopefully that takes care of the problem.
Do you think you have installed any extra Extensions which might lead to frequent crashes?
You can try
Devenv.exe /SafeMode
to start in Safe mode. You can also try
Devenv.exe /Log
Which will log all activity. Have not tried this so don't know What activities are logged.
Visual Studio 2010 Command Line Switches
I was having a similar problem and this helped me
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/618802/visual-studio-random-frequent-crash
Running this from the command prompt seemed to fix it. It hasn't crashed for the whole day today.
regsvr32 c:\Windows\System32\ole32.dll
I had similar issues with Visual Studio. The problem was the service pack which for some reason was not installed properly.
I had to reapply the SP1 using the Repair / reapply option. This kind of fixed my issue.
Also make sure to reboot the system.
Just to help people who search it: It was webex instant messenger related part, but not Cisco itself. The cause was a component in Studio Power Tools relevant to integration with messenger. Reinstall power tools but without messaging integration.
In other occasion it is almost always a corporate antivirus authentication helper thing. It required to manually remove registry entries which cause background TFS logins break the studio at random moments.
I had the "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has stopped working" error, imediately when Visual Studio 2010 was starting. Fault module was clr.dll in my case. Only rebooting helped sometimes.
I solved it by removing .NET completely and reinstalling it.
Be aware that if you updated to .NET 4.5 this includes .NET 4, so you have to remove and reinstall .NET 4.5
I know why it could be crashing. Code it self. Have you tried to debug the failed instance of VS2010 with Vs2010? If the xaml designer crashed anywhere in your code you should be able to see the stack trace. Also, try to load the same xaml into Blend 4 and then run the vs2010 on Blend when that crashes. I've had some good results debugging Vs2010 crashes like that.
There are so many things that can cause studio to crash.
I'd look at everything from video card drivers to whether the RAM is stable.
Note, there is a microsoft connect but on this exact issue at: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/634162/devenv-exe-frequent-intermittent-crashes-fault-module-name-ntdll-dll
You might vote on it or add your own information to the report but the very first thing I'd do is update my video drivers. One place I was at had a lot of issues with 2005; it would randomly crash just displaying the design surface or when opening a few too many code files; but once we got decent video cards and the appropriate drivers installed it worked flawlessly.
I disabled “Options"-"Evnironment"-"Add-in/Micros Security"->"Allow macros to run", and fixed the problem.
I think I just solved a similar issue on my computer, but probably not the same cause. It was related to TortoiseSVN (I think visual loads the tortoise DLL because it is integrated with the explorer, even if I don't have a specific visual studio plug-in). I upgraded TortoiseSVN (from 1.7.8 to 1.7.11) and it didn't crash for a few hours (I also had a 100% repro case when closing visual studio which does not happen anymore). Maybe there is some way to check what DLLs are loaded by visual studio to troubleshoot what are the candidates for upgrading/uninstalling, but I didn't go this far.
Hope it can help someone else.
While developing C++ code, Visual Studio 2010 started crashing frequently and at random times after I enabled the Task List.
As an alternative to using the Task List, I am now simply using the Find in Files tool (Ctrl+Shift+F) and searching for the string TODO as an alternative.
i was having a similar problem. visual studio 2010 was crashing. when i attached, it said it had a read access violation in ntdll.dll
closed all my open instances (there were 5) and it stopped happening.
Today I had this error, in my case it was because Microsoft released the update (KB2858725) the FrameWork 4.5.1, which the download and installed,
However this is definitely addressed by performing the following steps:
FrameWork 4.5.1 download (KB2858728) => NDP451-KB2858728-x86-x64-ENU.exe-Allos
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40779
Install the downloaded software (KB2858728)
Try Vs, but give the same error.
Uninstall the downloaded software (KB2858728)
(this task fully cleaned upgrade giving problems (KB2858725)
Install the downloaded software (KB2858728) again
Try Vs, this time if it will work
NOTE: NEVER! install update (KB2858725)
Logging helps indeed. I have the same problem with crashes. Since there could be numerous reasons and lots of log data, I wrote this .bat (Win7 x64, VS2010 Express) to keep logs organized and easy to analyze:
#echo off
rem date and time in format YYYYMonDD_hhmmss
set year=%DATE:~-4%
set month=%DATE:~3,2%
set day=%DATE:~0,2%
IF %month%==01 set monthstr=Jan
IF %month%==02 set monthstr=Feb
IF %month%==03 set monthstr=Mar
IF %month%==04 set monthstr=Apr
IF %month%==05 set monthstr=May
IF %month%==06 set monthstr=Jun
IF %month%==07 set monthstr=Jul
IF %month%==08 set monthstr=Aug
IF %month%==09 set monthstr=Sep
IF %month%==10 set monthstr=Oct
IF %month%==11 set monthstr=Nov
IF %month%==12 set monthstr=Dec
set now=%TIME:~0,-3%
set now=%now::=%
set now=%now: =0%
set now=%year%%monthstr%%day%_%now%
start "VS2010 express" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\VCExpress.exe" /Log "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VSlogs\VS_log_%now%.txt"
I had the same problem. I cleared my settings. Configured environment to use C# development settings. Then i disabled all extensions against which disable button was present. I enabled them one by one while opening, running and closing solutions. I found the offending extension to be .Net reflector v 8.5.0.179 by red gate. I had VS2010, VS2012 and VS2013 all installed on my windows 8.1 enterprise 64bit. All of them had the same issue. Whenever i closed the solution VS would crash. Hope it helps.
How can I stop Visual Studio (both 2005 and 2008) from crashing (sometimes) when I select the "Close All But This" option?This does not happen all the time either.
First, check Windows Update and make sure both VS environments are up to date.
If that doesn't help, uninstall them both completely, reinstall only 2005, update and test it. If 2005 doesn't crash, install 2008, update and test them both. Don't install any add-ons you may have been using until you've reinstalled and tested both editions of VS.
If one or the other does crash, you should try filing a bug against Visual Studio.
If they didn't crash, install any add-ons that you use one at a time and continue to test both editions after each one. (This will take ages, but that's how it has to be) When they start crashing, remove the offending add-on, and file a bug with the add-on developer. (be sure to tell them what other add-ons you're using, in case it only happens when 2 conflicting add-ons are installed.)
I would highly consider uninstalling and then installing Visual Studio again. Afterwards make sure you have installed available service packs for your VS version.
Does it happen on all projects or a specific one?
Does it only occurs when a specific file is open?
Try re-installing visual studio and any/all service packs.
Try to reset the Visual Studio settings (Tools->Import and Export Settings->Reset All Settings).
Maybe you can try to reproduce this using a specific solution and csproject file and report it to Microsoft?
That's the best shot you can ever have.
Another alternative:
Study for 10 years to become a really good programmer
Apply for (and get) a job at Microsoft in the Visual Studio team
Fix the bug