How To Debug VB.Net Crystal Reports Application That Causes VS2008 to Hang

Question

Hi,

I have encountered an error while debugging a VB.Net application in Visual Studio 2008. While debugging the console application in Visual Studio, when the application instantiates a Crystal Reports 'ReportDocument' object, VS2008 hangs. Even when the devenv.exe process has been killed, I am unable to kill the still running vshost.exe process for the console application. The console application is a port from a legacy VB6 application, and I suspect that a underlying COM call may be responsible for VS2008 hanging.

Can anyone offer any advice on how to identify the cause of this problem? If you can offer an exact answer for this specific problem, fine, but I am more interested in the process of debugging this issue further, specifically around identifying any COM interactions, I do not have any experience in this field.

Thanks, MagicAndi.

Note

• I am using the Crystal Reports 2008 Redistribution installer

Answer 1

I had a problem a couple of weeks ago with visual studio crashing at a certain point. I opened a second instance of VS with break on all errors switched on then attached to process of first instance of VS and hit the problem again. The exception was caught and this gave me an idea as to what was wrong.

It may not work in this instance but it is worth a try.