Multiple 'development servers' started by Visual Studio

Question

Occasionally, when performing certain actions in Visual Studio, things seem to go 'haywire' - Visual Studio launches many, many instances of the 'Development Server' - multiple icons appear in the notification area, multiple successive 'toast' notifications pop up etc etc.

Both of the solutions I have this problem with contain two web projects, one of which is set up to use ASP.NET forms authentication.

I am also using the Perforce source control plug-in. These solutions are under source control.

Actions that can prompt this behaviour are things like, creating a content page from a master page, clicking on the 'Configuration' icon at the top of the solution explorer. Ironically, actually running one of the projects doesn't seem to cause the same problems.

Once things have settled down, I end up with a notification area that fills half my taskbar. 'Running' the mouse along these icons then causes them to disappear, in the same way that you sometimes get with applications that have terminated unexpectedly.

This is becoming pretty frustrating as it tends to block things I actually want to do!

Grateful for any advice. Hopefully I've been sufficiently clear - it's not a straightforward issue to describe!

Thanks,

Jamie

Answer 1

Did you check the "Properties" page (right-click of your solution file) of your solution? You should be able to set the starting project there to "Single Startup Project".

Answer 2

Sounds like the Web Configuration service is failing during startup and VS is trying to restart it.

I would either stop using that tool--it always seemed overkill to me once you learn how to manipulate web.config and get your basic user/role admin CRUD pages on the site. But it may just be some bad data in your authentication database, if you're using the built-in Membership providers, etc. If it's development, try using the aspnet_sqlreg.exe (or whatever it's called) to remove and re-create the Membership, Profile, etc. database tables and stored procs.

But first, I would check the Application event logs and see if the exceptions there help you track down the issue.

Answer 3

Please check out the blog post at http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2009/08/multiple-instances-of-visual-studio.html