Maybe I’m just lucky. I hope that it is based on my developer fortune and not that Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is a piece of dunebuggy code…
I installed the newly released SP1 (I had skipped the SP1 beta1 and beta2) and then tried to open a WPF project that I had created in straight vs2008. Anytime that I was so bold as to open an XAML file in the designer, VS paused for a moment and then died.
<RANT>Forget the Vista niceties of noticing the crash and tallying the crash against the “stability” of my system. No. This is a Microsoft product. We can’t have Visual Studio show up on the list of shifty programs.</RANT>
I thought about it a bit and tried a few things. Each attempt was rewarded with a silent crash except the last:
WORKAROUND (SO FAR): Create a new WPF Window (or control). For me, this process took inordinately long, and then the new Window/Control showed up. After that point, I could easily view and edit my other XAML files in the designer. Grrr. Yay!
Update: A couple folks have also posted comments detailing how they got things to "refresh" and stop crashing:
- Open documents in full XAML view (avoiding the crash when the control displays in the designer?) (Thanks Brad)
- Opened AppConfig.xaml (Which is XAML but has no controls to display in the designer) (Thanks Vasco)
Update 2: A patch is available for the XAML designer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
A co-worker of mine just had the same issue. I posted a possible work around by opening documents in full XAML view on my blog http://team.interknowlogy.com/blogs/bradcunningham/default.aspx
ReplyDeleteThanks brad, that may be a useful way to deal with designer problems in the future. (Or to avoid slowdowns when you just want to hack XAML).
ReplyDeleteUPDATE: I only had to do the "create WPF Window" operation once, and haven't had any further issues. Evidentally the WPF Window wizard in VS 2008 fixed/fixes something that was hosed up in my installation. Go figure...
An interesting identical case also happened to me:
ReplyDeletehttp://vascooliveira.com/Blog/archive/2008/12/18/vs-2008-sp1-silent-crash-of-death.aspx