Visual Studio 2008 freezes when I edit XAML code

Question

A few times a day my VS2008 SP1 freezes if I edit XAML code. It just got stuck and I have to kill the process. It seems to be a problem with the IntelliSense or the spell-checking or whatever process is going on while I edit code. The problem is very apparent if I copy+paste some code. Even if it is just one word. Many times VS2008 adds some additional commands in the code and messes things up completely.

This never happened with C# code only with XAML it does get stuck.

One more thing: It seems the problem only occurs when I edit control templates. I added a few control templates from the MSDN pages to my project. When I edit them - even doing simple things like changing brush colors - Visual Studio freezes (sometimes). So it seems it's not a general XAML problem it happens with control templates only.

Answer 1

You could try this update: Installing DExplorer after VS 2008 breaks xaml intellisense

EDIT: You could try closing the Properties window when editing XAML, it helped me before with ASP.NET.

Some other links:

• Xaml Editor Crashes after Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Using the Source Code Editor for XAML in Visual Studio

Answer 2

After having this problem and hunting around on the interwebs I found this vsnet-crashes-when-editing-xaml

Which said, in summary, if you edit a xaml resource while something that uses said resource is open in a designer, then you'll be sorry.

So you can avoid the problem by

• Closing the other designer windows;
• Installing hotfix KB958017.