I'm getting a application hang, can anyone else reproduce it

[mgbrown]

I'm getting an application hang in DiffMerge 3.1. It is a bit trivial, but I'm interested to see if anyone else gets this?

Steps to reproduce:

1. You need Visual Studio 2005, DiffMerge 3.1 & Visual Source Safe (VSS) 2005.
2. Load the VSS settings go to Custom Editors and set the .cs extention to use: "C:\Program Files\SourceGear\DiffMerge\DiffMerge.exe" /ro2 %1 %2
3. Load a cs file out of a source safe project and check it out.
4. Select some text from the file and copy it.
5. Right click the .cs file in the Solution Explorer and select compare.
6. Once DiffMerge has loaded select Edit->Find.
7. Delete anything in the Find String box and leave the cursor there.
8. Hit Ctrl+V.

Problem
The application just hangs and no text appears.

What I was expecting
The text I copied out of the CS file to be pasted into the box.

[jeffhostetler]

That's odd. We've not seen this before.
And I wasn't able to reproduce it this morning.
(I don't have VSS installed, but that shouldn't matter.)

Can you tell me more about what you were attempting to paste?
Was there anything special about the text? such as non-ascii
characters, multiline, etc. was it an exceptionally long passage
that you copied?

thanks,
jeff

[mgbrown]

I was trying to past "CheckedButton_Click" without the quotes. It seems to fail with other strings too. I've tried simple words like "Unchecked" as well. All the strings work fine if I just type them, it is only if I past from the clipboard. I wouldn't be half supprised if it is just my cranky machine.

[jeffhostetler]

hum. that should be fine. (I've had some Unicode-related problems
in the past, but that should be fine.)

What OS/version/processor do you have??

Does it happen in text fields in other dialogs, such as the
File|Open File Diff... ?

If you open a pair of files (using that dialog so that the right
one is editable) can you paste into the right document?

If you copy from a different app (like notepad) does it happen?

jeff

[mgbrown]

OS: Window's XP SP2 + Updates
Processor: Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz
Mem: 2Gb
PC: Dell Optiplex GX520

Yes it does happen in other dialogs, and it seems to happen in other applications too (I tried Notepad), but only when I do a compare.

If I leave off the \ro2 switch I get the same thing pasting into the right hand file.

No it does not happen if the source of the copy is anything other than Visual Studio.

I also swaped out the command for DiffMerge and replaced it with this:

Notepade.exe %2

And guess what I still get the hang when I paste. So I guess this must be either a fault in Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Source-Safe 2005.

What it looks like to me is that Visual Studio's UI thread is blocking when it launches the compare tool. This block is waiting until the Compare tool closes. I'm going to guess that in order to do a copy and past the application that put the data on the clipboard needs to respond to some Win32 Message which it can't do because the UI thread is blocked.

[jeffhostetler]

uh, i don't know what to suggest. sounds like a problem
with the VSS plugin for VS.

if i have to start guessing, i'd say look and see if there
is anything on the VSS boards about pasting problems
when using their plugin with VS.

uh, i wonder -- can you do an "start notepad.exe %s" ??
i don't know if the indirection implied by "start" will do
the trick and fool the VSS plugin to unblocking the thread.
it's hard to suggest this with a straight face, but if it works,
i'll take credit for it....

if that doesn't work you might try a simple .bat file
that does the same thing and see if that helps.

please post back if you get it working.

jeff

[mgbrown]

I've raised a bug report with Microsoft for this which can be viewed here: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStu ... kID=324771

I don't suppose it will get anywhere very quicly though.