KB 963035 - Hotfix for periodic hangs in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 WPF designer.

Question

Some customers have experienced hangs of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 after several hours of working with the Windows Presentation Foundation Designer. This does not affect all users and we do not have a concrete way of reproducing the behavior.

The hangs are characterised by the "Visual Studio is Busy" tray icon appearing in the sytem tray and remaining there. The user usually needs to use the task manager to kill the devenv.exe process when this happens.

If you are experiencing this issue with the WPF designer, we have just released a Hotfix for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 which fixes it.

You can acquire the Hotfix at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB963035

Thanks

Mark Wilson-Thomas
Program Manager, WPF & Silverlight Designer Team, Visual Studio

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Answer 1

Thank you, I've been bitten by this bug dozens of times.

By the way, the hotfix download worked but the KB link on the download page goes nowhere.

Answer 2

Thanks for the feedback Chris, and we're glad that this issue is finally resolved for our Visual Studio 2008 SP1 WPF designer customers.
 
For those interested in the details, this issue took an unusually long time to fix because there is still no way of reproducing it in our labs, so we were only able to resolve it by analysis of stack dumps from hung machines and working with a dedicated group of customers who were experiencing the issue to ensure we had properly corrected it.

The KB article for the fix is in press and the link will be up in due course, but we did not want to slow down release of this Hotfix whilst awaiting it.

I'd like to say a public thank you to our user community for your help in the verification of this Hotfix, and also your patience in awaiting a fix for this bug.


Mark Wilson-Thomas
Program Manager, WPF & Silverlight Designer Team, Visual Studio

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Answer 3

I have this bad expirence on windows 7 rc now.  I installed visual studio 2008 on windows 7 rc, but when i create wpf project, visual studio 2008 hanged, and did not responding.  i tried to install vs2008 sp1, but this issue still was exist.

today , i saw this thread, and installed this hotfix, but nothing changed.  what should i do ?

by the way, i can create other type of projects successfully.

thanks a lot!

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http://www.silverlight.cn

Answer 4

Hi Li Xiadong

Based on your symptoms this is not the problem that this Hotfix is intended to fix.

The Hotfix is for cases where the WPF designer loads, but then after a while of working, Visual Studio 2008 hangs with a "Visual Studio is Busy" icon in the sytem tray. In your case it sounds like the product is not even loading correctly.

I am happily currently running Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on Windows 7 RC 32 bit myself on one of my machines, so can vouch for it working; I am wondering if there is some corruption of your installation.

Let's take the first steps to debugging this issue:

0. Has this ever worked?

1. Try closing Visual Studio then starting an elevated (run as administrator) Visual Studio 2008 command prompt and entering this command: devenv /resetskippkgs . This will reset the list of skipped packages loading up and restart Visual Studio.

2. If that doesn't work, please check if you can run a WPF application (pick a public WPF application such as digitweet and attempt to run it) at all

3. Check your event log around the time that Visual Studio hangs - see if there are any entries from the CLR or devenv.exe

Since this is not an issue related to this Hotfix, to keep this thread clean please send me email at mwthomas at microsoft dot com to continue this discussion.

Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Answer 5

Hi Mark,

Thank you so much, you have indirectly helped me with my problem.

I have been trying to use Web Developer Express and Visual Studio on the same project.

I have Windows 7 RC running on a really nice laptop, and everytime, I would start to add a tag it would hang.

It would even hang after running the project.

All I need was to run as administrator.

Thanks again,

-Edward

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Edward

Answer 6

I am running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.  I am unable to open a new WPF project all of a sudden in VS2008 SP1, simply hangs before the basic default screen is displayed, visual studio is 50% CPU.  Visual Studio version 9.030729.1 SP  It worked fine up until 2 days ago.  I uninstalled all windows updates based on a date/time I new things worked.  

If i log into Visual Studio 2008 winforms project and change my default view of *.xaml to kaxaml, subsequent WPF VS projects loads fine.  What is up with the VS 2008 Windows Presentation Foundation Designer.?  where do i go from here?  It was working fine until 2 days ago??  Someone had mentioned maybe security with "Presentation Host", any suggestions?

Answer 7

Hi @SMR dev

I'm really sorry to hear you're hitting these issues - I hope we can work to find out what the problem you are seeing is caused by.

A few questions:
1. Reading your post I am not clear whether rolling back to a date/time when you knew things worked got you working again?
2. Please can you tell me (you should be able to see this in Control Panel\System and Security\Windows Update\View update history ) what updates you had installed over the last week?
3. Have you installed any of the following KB's - KB958017, KB963035 (check "Installed Updates" in the add/remove programs control panel)
4. I am assuming that you mean a Visual Studio 2008 WPF project not a Windows Forms project (since you're talking about XAML files)
5. Have you tried running devenv /resetskippkgs from an elevated VS2008 command prompt? Did you see any errors when opening VS2008 having done this?

Thanks, and sorry once again that you have hit an issue here.

Regards
Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Answer 8

I know this is un-related to WPF - but do you know if there is a similar hotfix for this issue with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Windows Forms Designer?  I constantly have to deal with VS hanging and looping when going to Design view on a form.  It can take anywhere from 10 - 40 minutes for the form to actually appear in a usable state.  This has only started since I upgraded to VS 2008 from VS 2005 (never once had this problem in VS 2005).

I can't find a forum specific to Visual Studio WinForms Designer - and the issue described here is very similar to what I experience, but not with WPF.

Answer 9

Hi @jonathan_q

I am sorry, but I don't know the answer to your question.

I can however tell you where the Windows Forms Designer forum is:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winformsdesigner/threads/

You should receive a better answer to your questions about Windows Forms there.

Thanks

Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'