VS 2003 Freezes up on load

[Jeremy]

I am still plagued with this problem. Here is a little more information to assist troubleshooting the problem:

Of all the developers on the team working on the same solution, I am the only one with the problem. We all have the same hardware / software configuration. I have also verified that we have the same exact settings / options for VS. I even deleted the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1] hive to make sure all options were reset to the original defaults.

The problem exists both when opening user controls and web services in the HTML editor; both inherit off a custom base class. (Why open asmx files in the editor? because I forget to click "view code" on the web service, and by default the IDE opens it up in the editor.)

When opening the ascx files in the HTML editor, there is always a pause which usually lasts a second or two. Sometimes it loads OK, and sometimes it never comes back.

When I remove the project containing the base classes for my user controls and web services from the solution and reference the assembly directly, the problem seems to go away. Unfortunately this is not an option due to how we do our nightly builds. Interestingly, removing the base class form the solution causes the ascx files to load in the editor in an instant. The pause that I described above is gone.

I was thinking that the reason VS was compiling the base class while loading the ascx file was to validate the schema, so I turned HTML/XML validation off. This did not solve the problem.

Jeremy

[dan]

As previously posted, we've not been able to reproduce this here, and the hang isn't happening in Vault, since the log files don't show a Vault call prior to/during the hang. I wish we could make some progress here on it, but it looks like something that those with the issue will need to look for workarounds.

Some ideas though:

1. Put VS into offline mode until you want to checkin code (via Change Source Control, Disconnect, or perhaps cancelling the login and then restarting VS). If the problem is related to Vault being a loaded .Net app running within VS, not loading Vault until you need to might mitigate the problem.

2. I seem to remember a different issue related to VS being hung because project references had "Copy Local" set to true. Try setting it to false for the base class, and see whether that helps at all.

3. You can always just work via the GUI client, and not use IDE integration. I know this unacceptable for a lot of folks, but I don't know what else we can do.

[Tonya]

The problem with Jeff appears to be resolved. After further discussion, I realized that he was continuing to open the same project from source control instead of opening the project from source control for the first time only. The problem does not exist when the project is opened using File-Open-Project. I explained to him that the only time a project should be opened using the "open from source control" option is when the project doesn't already exists on the users machine.

Tonya Nunn
SourceGear Support