At some point today, whenever I run the C# console app that I'm developing in Visual Studio 2022 on Mac, a pink/purple window opens with the title "TerminalPad-TerminalPad-0" in the frame of the window. An additional normal looking terminal window within which the application actually runs opens, takes keyboard input and displays output. When the application successfully completes, the pink/purple window goes away.
How do I stop this purple/pink window from opening?
I tried changing all the terminal options I could find in VS with no change. I don't know what I did to make this start happening.
I started having this happen to me today (11/10/22) as well. There's another thread with the same issue, required a full uninstall with a 3rd party uninstaller ("App Cleaner and Uninstaller", has two day trial) and then full reinstall. Just dragging the Visual Studio icon to the trash won't fix it.
I had this issue after a VS update. I uninstalled using the Microsoft provided scripts linked to from within this page:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/mac/uninstall?view=vsmac-2022
and currently leading to the script at this location (please double check above page if the below link is dead):
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MicrosoftDocs/visualstudio-docs/master/mac/resources/uninstall-vsmac.sh
I then reinstalled using the MS provided installer for MacOS. All working fine now.
It took around 15 mins in total to resolve.
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 have a WPF solution in Visual Studio 2013 update 2 with over 100 projects, mostly C#. I have a small C# exe as the start-up project which does some basic initialisation and displays a file open dialog which appears within a few seconds.
I have recently encountered an intermittent problem that occurs a few seconds after launching the debugger, usually before the file open dialog is displayed. Visual Studio starts loading dependencies (visible in the status bar at the foot of the window), then suddenly goes unresponsive and fails to recover.
Crucially, it is impossible to launch new processes or close windows/terminate existing processes. It is still possible to interact superficially with programs that were already running, i.e. menus in user interfaces are still clickable but have no effect. Running any command in an open cmd prompt causes the window to stop responding; Ctrl+Alt+Del/Ctrl+Shift+Esc have no effect. The only option is a hard reset.
I have tried deleting PDBs and performing a full clean/rebuild, to no avail. There is also nothing of interest in the system or application event logs.
This issue started happening a few days ago and has become more regular, but remains intermittent.
I deleted the solution's SDF file, and the issue has not occurred since.
I was on the process of starting a new WPF application with VS2010 beta 2, and while trying to add some menu items to a window VS hang. I terminated the program and restarted it. However, since then VS2010 crashes every time i try to either open any solution or when i try to create one. There is no messagebox, nothing, just a beep and then VS crashes.
Has anyone experienced this before? Is there any way to find out if vs writes or logs anything before crashing? This is really annoying. :(
There is a similar bug reported, only that a (unelpful) dialog box appears when trying to open Visual Studio. The workaround in that case is to reset Visual Studio to its initial state by running it via devenv /resetuserdata, maybe this helps in your case too if you can't find a better solution. See here more details: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=499244
Try opening a second copy of VS2010, attaching its debugger to the first copy, and telling the second one to break on all exceptions (Debug, Exceptions).
Then, try again in the first copy, and see if the second copy shows you an exception. (and tell us what the exception is)
I have this problem where I open Visual Studio and the internal windows are scattered all over the place. None of them are docked; some that should be visible have become invisible and vice versa. I then have to spend ages getting the windows back where I like them.
It only seems to happen with some solutions and only appeared recently.
For the life of me I can't fix the problem. Has anyone else been through this?
Sounds like there is definitely a problem with Visual Studio retaining your settings between round-trips and possibly your Visual Studio settings profile in general.
The solution I'd recommend is firstly to reset all settings, secondly customize things to your personal preference and finally take a backup of those customized settings. The idea is that this settings backup file can be used later to automate a quick settings restore to a point you are happy with. The following steps show how to do this and hopefully should sort out even the most confused Visual Studio setting issues:
Close down all instances of Visual Studio.
Go to Start > Programs > Visual Studio 200X > Visual Studio Tools > and choose 'Visual Studio 200X Command Prompt'
Run the sligthly less well known 'devenv.exe /ResetUserData' command. With this command you will lose all of your Visual Studio environment settings and customizations. Because of this, the /ResetUserData switch is not officially supported and Microsoft does not advertise it (the switch is not described in the help for devenv.exe you get when you type devenv.exe /? in a command prompt). Importantly, wait for the resulting devenv.exe process to disappear from Task Manager or even better Process Explorer.
When the process disappears from Task Manager or Process Explorer, run 'devenv.exe /ResetSettings' which will restore the IDE's default settings and eventually start a single instance of Visual Studio.
Now in Visual Studio choose 'Import and Export Settings...' near the bottom of the 'Tools' menu to start the Import and Export Settings Wizard.
Choose 'Reset all settings' radio button and Next > Choose 'No, just reset settings, overwriting my current settings' and Next > Choose your personal 'Settings Collection' preference, I would choose Visual C# Development Settings here (Note: What you choose here has an effect on keyboard shortcuts etc. but you can always repeat this process until happy) and click Finish.
When you get the message that 'Your settings were successfully reset to XXXXXX Development Settings.' click Close then spend a good bit of time adding any personal customizations to Visual Studio such as opening windows you always want open, customizing toolbars and adding any toolbar buttons etc.
When you are finished with your personal customization and completely happy with your setup go again to Tools > 'Import and Export Settings...'
Choose 'Export selected environment settings' radio button and Next > Tick 'All Settings' and Next > Choose a file name and directory and click Finish to store a backup of your current settings in a .vssettings file.
In future if things go haywire again head back to Tools > 'Import and Export Settings...' and this time choose 'Import selected environment settings' radio button and Next > Choose 'No, just import new settings, overwriting my current settings' and Next > Either choose the name of your .vssettings file from the list (usually under the My Settings folder) or Browse.. to where you saved the file and Next > Tick 'All Settings' and click Finish.
Importantly, close the single instance of Visual Studio. Any future instance you open should retain your latest customizations.
Visual Studio corrupts its settings with regular monotony (always has done, I've been suffering from this since the Visual C++ days, and it's still a bugbear in VS2013).
Often this seems to be totally at random, but it's highly probable after a crash.
It will also lose any changes to your settings if Visual Studio doesn't shut down cleanly - for some reason instead of saving back the settings when you OK the dialog, VS seems to wait until it quits to write back your changes, so after changing options I always quit and restart to ensure the changes have been flushed to disk. Similarly you should never change options with 2 or more instances of VS running, as the last one to quit will overwrite the settings.
In particular, there is an easily reproducible case: If you launch two or more copies at the same time (by which I mean if you start up two or more copies, so they are all initialising at the same time), they seem to fight over the settings file and it becomes corrupted or resets to defaults.
The best two workarounds I've found are:
Never launch more than one instance at a time. If you need to run several instances concurrently, then wait for the first one to finish loading its Solution before you start to launch the next.
Always use Tools > Import and Export Settings to save your settings to a backup file, so that recovering from this corruption only takes a few seconds each time it happens.
Another smaller, but still rather irritating habit is that if VS is minimised when it is quit (e.g. by shutting down), it corrupts its window position information and the next time you run it, it will be maximised.
I had a similar issue when the My Documents folder was stored on a mapped drive. If I opened VS before mapping the drive, VS would act as if it was the first time it had been opened. I solved this issue by storing the environment settings on the local disk.
I just ran into this problem too (seemed to trigger after a windows update) where I kept getting some bogus window layout no matter what I did. The above suggestions didn't work either. But luckily the suggestions in: Why doesn't VS 2008 IDE remember my preferences? of deleting:
%APPDATA%\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\windows.prf
worked.
TP
Actually I worked out what the culprit was: previous VS crashes.
If one of my Visual Studio instances crashes for whatever reason - the next time I start up VS, I get a weird batch of settings. The behaviour depends on various factors, like whether or not I had other instances of VS open at the time.
I tried Peter McG's solution, still didn't help.
What ended up working for me was to delete my VS Solution User Options (.sou). Located in the same directory as my solution.
Only bad thing is you have to redo all of your settings. This included my exception changes. Not to much to change, but if you have a lot of customization it could be a real pain.
There must be something in that file messing everything up, but deleting the whole file is quick and easy.
Which solution you're opening shouldn't matter because those settings are not solution-specific. But I wonder do you maybe have Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 installed? If so, opening a solution created in 2005 will open VS 2005 and opening a 2008 solution will open VS 2008. You may have VS 2005 even if you didn't install it. For example, InfoPath 2007 installs a VS 2005 shell.
First I would position the windows where you want them, then do a Tools -> Export Settings and include only the window layouts. That way you at least have something you can revert to.
Then I would check Tools -> Options -> Import Export Settings and make note of where the "Automatically Save My Settings To This File" path is set to. Keep an eye on that file. Do you have any sync software that may be inadvertently overwriting it? Does it point to a non-existing location?
My issue is similar, but the result is the app crashes. The problem was this value
In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\MainWindow. It was set to "0 1000 -280 -100 3" probably due to having multiple screens and moving the UI around a lot.
Deleting this value allowed the app to restart successfully. It gets recreated on startup.
I'm facing similar issue. And it also only started recently, like, within the last 30 days or so. The only thing I remember changing in this period was updating Resharper 4.5.
I have experienced something similar. In my case the text editor colors (c# editor for example) are going haywire. The only solution that I tried and works for me is change color theme so something else and then back to what I want.
In my case its not the Window layout being corrupted but Intellisense offering code completion and pop-up help. Never had this issue for the last decade, now it happens 3 times a day at least. Win8.1, Visual Studio 2013, ReSharper 8 and now ReSharper 9 (in hopes the upgrade would fix it).
I now routinely have to
close the solution,
Tools/Import-Export Settings/Reset all settings
Close Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio Import my saved settings
RE-open the solution and continue working
I can then work fine again for quite some time until something goes awry... lets say a stack-overflow while I'm debugging. At that point I just know my settings are screwed and my Intellisense is dead again.
I'm starting to wonder if it isn't something to do with a latest Visual Studio update. There are things in there I never use like the advertising crap and Office development integration. MS Office has its own issues, like Office 64 bit not being seen by any other application such as Quicken as an installed email program. Or maybe its a conflict with ReSharper which wants to overtake and 'extend' the Intellisense feature.
Either way, I'm sure its a different manifestation of the same issue: Visual Studio settings are going sideways during normal use.
I just came across this issue in VS 2012, reset window layout was doing nothing.
I extrapolated
%APPDATA%\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\windows.prf
to
%appdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Windows.index
... deleted it and was back in business!
Make sure you close all instances of VS first!