I am experiencing this weird problem with Visual Studio 2022.
I created the skeleton of a new web application using individual accounts.
I have run the first migration, created some default accounts in the aspnet identity tables and
finally launched the application to test if everything was correctly setup in my PC.
Visual Studio compiles the application without problems and launch the defaul browser (Edge).
The standard Welcome page appears but immediately Visual Studio pops to the front doing nothing.
No errors, no messages nothing wrong. Just the code window here to obscure the browser window.
Now, I switch to the browser window and click on the Login link.
Again, the login window briefly appears in the browser but it is immediately obscured by Visual Studio.
Switch again to the browser, compile the required fields and click on login.
Again Visual Studio thinks that he is the best app on the planet and brings itself on the foregroud.
I have tried to switch to another browser, but the results are the same.
I have tried with an existing application written with Visual Studio 2019, but again the "pop in front of everything" still happens.
I have tried to search for this problem but probably I haven't find the right keywords to represent this problem correctly to a search engine.
I think that probably I have something wrong in the Visual Studio configuration, but it is practically impossible to find something there if you don't know what to look for.
The only option that seems to be related is "Bring Visual Studio to the foreqround when breaking in the debugger" but even after uncheking the option the "pop to front" persists.
So my question is simple. Has anyone experienced a similar behavior? If yes how have you fixed it?
Well, probably this situation is so messed that none will ever see this post.
Nevertheless I would like to share how I have finally resolved the question and leave here a warning for future readers.
The cause of Visual Studio 2022 hiccups is, probably, the import of Visual Studio 2019 settings.
I thought that it was a good idea to set 2022 with the same options used in the last 3 years so, after installing VS 2022
I used this very useful menu (Tools->Import Export Settings) to export all the Visual Studio 2019 Settings in an XML file and I reimported it in 2022.
I thought, if the file is not compatible with VS2022 surely it will abort the import. Right?
No, Visual Studio 2022 doesn't complain during the import of 2019 settings.
But something in that exported file should be very broken.
I have resolved the problem with these steps
Close Visual Studio 2022
Open a command prompt window with administrator rights
Change to the install folder for Visual Studio 2022 and then change dir to subfolder "Common7\IDE"
Finally execute the command
devenv /ResetSettings
After this everything started to work as expected without problems.
I have saved the broken VS2019 setting file and tried to compare it with one produced after the reset,
but they have too many differences to extract something useful to identify the specific problem area
I get a blank security warning popup window when trying to open a website, in Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition. It worked on my other computer in the same environment.
I moves the files to a new fresh computer and I get this window.
Here's a screenshot:
Nothing is clickable, even what where the buttons should be. Visual Studio is just frozen, can't even close the IDE nor the popup window. It doesn't happen to Web Projects, only websites.
Any idea how to solve this?
I got the same issue. Just fixed it. In my case it was entity ".tt" files fault. I guess for some reason VS 2015 does not recognize ".tt" extension. I've just deleted these files and run website (not web application) successfully
The .tt files are needed if using Entity Framework.
Here is my workaround that worked in two cases of the blank security warning. Rename the files with .tt extension to .tt.old.
Open the project (it will not compile, so don't try)
Save and close the project
Rename the .tt.old files back to their original names
Open the project again, this time the warning will have content and will be clickable.
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!
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 2010 Professional hangs up 99.999% of the time when I try to open a website as "Remote Site" through an HTTP address. However if i open the site through a unc path instead of through HTTP, it works fine. Of course that is not always feasible, for example when working from offsite. The same sites (assuming they are not NET40 sites) work fine in Visual Studio 2008, so I'm pretty sure it is not a problem with the Front Page Server Extensions.
If i run 2010 in /safe mode, it opens the projects fine. So i figured maybe it was one of my installed extensions. I therefore disabled all my extensions and tried again, but it still hangs up. So it is apparently something in Visual Studio itself that is different between safe and normal modes.
I ran it in logging mode, and checked the log but did not see anything that stuck out to me. The log is uploaded here: http://pastebin.com/aUnVanB1 .
The exact symptoms I am seeing are that when i click on the project name, it pops up and asks me for my credentials. I enter those, and click OK, and it then loads the solution explorer, and i see the tree view, but then it just hangs with the progress dialog that says "Preparing Solution...". The progress bar keeps cycling, but it never finishes loading, and the spot where the properties window would be in the VS UI is completely unpainted, with just a blank, empty, white space.
Any one have any clue what else i could do to try to figure out why 2010 hangs when attempting to load websites via HTTP? Thanks!
Thanks for your question... you gave me the right clue to solve my problem!
My VS 2010 was hanging (in fact was very slow to get available) when I was openening a solution containing a remote website and I was due to press Escape a few times to cancel the pending operation... As you suggest I tried to open such a solution with /safeMode and VS2010 became available quite instantly.
So as you pointed the VS Extensions... I checked mine (all from Telerik): opening the extension manager I discovered that some updates where available. I thought the extensions updates were automatically proposed and so never checked that before. In fact, you need to manually check with the extension manager if some are available.
I've updated all my Telerik extensions... and now I may open normally all solutions including a remote website.
Thanks a lot! Perhaps... you need to updates your extensions???
Check you network order preference in Windows.
I had a similar problem where DNS would cause a hang of 1 minute before trying again (and again and finally on the next network).
Under Network, Advanced Settings (WinXP):