Visual Studio unusable after installing Debugger Canvas

Question

The subject says it all - or almost.  VS 2010 Ultimate SP1, lastest hotfixes.   After installing Debugger Canvas, when I try to open a solution in visual studio, VS crashes with a generic "Microsoft Visual Studio has encountered an error and must close" dialog box.

Based on removing the two extensions one by one, it's the "VS Fragments" extension that's causing this error.

The error that's occurring is "Attempt to read or write protected memory.  This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt".

VS2010 Ultimate SP1

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1

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-cd Mark the best replies as answers!

Answer 1

Hi Carl,

Thanks for reporting! This problem is new to us, and sounds pretty serious!

Can you tell us more about your system? Do you have any other VS extensions installed? Do you have any other versions of VS installed on the same system?

Thanks,

--Jens

Answer 2

Jens -

I'm not at that machine right now, but if I recall correctly, I have only the VS 2010 Power Tools and VS 2010 Power Commands extensions installed.  I did check for updates, and no updates were shown for any of the extensions I have installed.

The machine does have VS 2008 Team System in addition to VS 2010 Ultimate, along with SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2.

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Answer 3

Hi Carl,

That is helpful. I'll try if that is enough to reproduce the problem.

Thanks!

--Jens

Answer 4

Jens -

Thanks for looking into this.  Meanwhile, I'll try debugger canvas on another similarly configured machine today.

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Answer 5

OK, I tried Debugger Canvas on another similar machine, and in this case I had no problems with VS stability.  I'll take a closer look at the first machine next time I'm working at that location (tomorrow).

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Answer 6

Great! If you find anything, let us know.

Thanks!

--Jens

Answer 7

Hi again,

I did a little bit of research, and found cases similar to this (although with no Debugger Canvas involvement). In those cases, the crashes would be tied to the Solution, not the machine, so it seemed like the solution was corrupted. Is this the case for you as well, or will no Solution open at all?

Thanks,

--Jens

Answer 8

I tried three solutions, each with ~20 projects - none of them would open.  Removing Debugger Canvas allowed all of those solutions to load - these are all solutions that i work with on an alomst daily basis. 

In each of these solutions there are a number of C# EXE and DLL projects, plus a single C++ Makefile project.  This makefile project contains no code and is simply used as a greatly enhanded post-build step that copies files from the various projects into a "release image" folder that has all of the file layed out as they would be when installed. 

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Answer 9

Hi Carl,

Sorry for the slow response. Thanks for providing the extra detail, that is very helpful! You said that Debugger Canvas worked well on another similar machine. Could you open these projects on that machine?

Thanks!

--Jens

Answer 10

Jens -

Yes - same projects on both machines.  They're checked out of TFS, so I know the project files themselves are identical.  Root cause must be some difference in exactly what's installed on the two machines that I haven't identified yet.

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Answer 11

Got it. Thanks Carl!

--Jens