Any idea why VS2008 crashes reliably at the end of a solution rebuild?

Question

VS2008 SP1, Winforms solution, VB.NET, compiling for x86 and .NET v2

I have about a dozen projects in the solution, with a couple of Windows forms projects and some class libraries.

If I rebuild the solution, it clears out and recompiles all the projects, as you'd expect...

... and then disappears without trace or error message. Since I'm reconnecting to VSS 2005 over HTTP across the internet, it takes all month to start back up with everything loaded, so it's incredibly irritating.

The compiled application itself works fine, and normal build and run after changes also works fine.

Any ideas why this might be? I've Googled without much success.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Just to clarify, No add-ins except Refactor! (I know, I guess I ought to try uninstalling it to see if it's that, but it's just too useful! - I will see if there's an update though).

And no custom build steps. It's just a vanilla Winforms app, with references between the projects (and some references to COM dlls for interop).

Thanks for the ideas so far..

EDIT AFTER PROBLEM SOLVED

Ok, guys, thanks again for all the ideas.

It turned out to be the version of Refactor! I was using. I installed the latest, and the crashing stopped... and Refactor! stopped working too. So I shut down VS, uninstalled Refactor! completely, and reinstalled the latest version... and now I no longer get the mysterious crashes, and Refactor! works again.

You might say, 'Duh, why didn't you try this ages ago', and it's a fair question... you know the way it is - something that happens intermittently... immediate pressures of urgent priorities... and of course the new version wasn't available then, and the benefits of the old version weren't trivial. So, 3rd party addin the culprit.

Thanks again..

Answer 1

Do you have any custom build steps for any of the projects you're building? They could be causing the crash.

Answer 2

Do you use any third-party plug-ins, it will cause this too.

Answer 3

I had this issue with a couple of WinForms apps. I had to perform these exact steps in this exact order.

1. Close all of the designer files from the IDE. Or just close all of the files so your workspace is empty
2. Exit all instance of Visual Studio
3. Open VS, open project, do a full rebuild. That fixed me ... for awhile.

The common denominator for me is that all project that this happened to were created using older versions of Visual Studio. That's as far as I got tracking down the problem though.

I had no 3rd party plugins installed at the time.

Hope this little bit helps.

Answer 4

You're forgetting VSS as a plugin. I recommend you to change your source code control system to SVN. It will cost you a couple of days or may be weeks to get used to it but it worth the pain. I know that's not always in your desition scope but if it is you will have lots of benefits with that change.

Answer 5

1. Try to debug Visual Studio, using WinDBG or Visual Studio. Attach to the faulting Visual Studio (before it crashes) and make sure that you stop on all exceptions. If its a managed exception then you can probably understand what happened, if it's not try to see in the callstack who is the faulting dll.
2. Also try to work without source control, the quickest way is to disable the network card (no kidding).
3. reinstall Visual Studio...

Answer 6

See the answers to a similar question.