Why does Visual Studio 2005/2008 keep 'forgetting' to color code and format?

Question

Does any else have a problem where when using VS2005 or VS2008, it suddenly 'forgets' to color code and format the text for you? All of a sudden it acts like its a plain old notepad editor. Sometimes if I save and re-open the file, or else re-start Visual studio altogether, it suddenly 'remembers'. I thought maybe this was because of a bad install on my machine, but recently upgraded to a new one, brand new fresh install with all service packs - and we are right back to the erratic behaviour....

Is this a known problem? Is there a workaround (i.e. a key combo I can hit to tell it to do its thing?)

PS: This happens for me when doing asp.net with VB code - not sure if it affects other flavors of the tool...

EDIT: This is a clean install of VS2008 on Vista, but also have had it on XP. No addins on either setup, problem happens routinely.

Answer 1

Sometimes something similar to this happens to me in VB.Net. In my case it has alway been the backgroundcompiler service that has stopped working for one reason or another. Haven't found anything that helps besides restarting visual studio.

Answer 2

I use C# in VS2008, and haven't had any problems. Maybe this is VB.NET related?

Answer 3

I used to see the problem with "Web Sites". I have since changed most of my projects to "Web Applications" and haven't seen the issue in a while.

Answer 4

I had a similar issue with VS 2003. I use VS 2008 right now and this doesn't happen anymore.

Answer 5

I got this often when working on large web projects (> 1K pages and 4K total files) and most often on ashx files.

At the same time, I would lose intellisense, This was happening because the files I was adding were not getting marked as "Compile" in the file properties -> build option.

I never found the cause (assumed it was overburdening the solution) but I found that it would stay fixed for longer if I deleted the SUO file periodically (it was getting into the 1MB range).

Since coming to a new company, new PC, etc, I have not had this problem but then again I'm not working on as large of a web project.