Beta Debris?
DDJ: Okay, you mentioned three there. The first is that you're working along, and the CPU pegs at 99 percent, and that was fixed by the hotfix, or turning off edit-and-continue, or uninstalling Refactor!, correct?
Rocky: I can shed a little light on that. I have not yet applied the hotfix, and I have not turned off edit-and-continue, but I did uninstall and reinstall Refactor!, and that did solve the problem for me. It appears that one of the beta versions of Refactor! didn't remove everything from the GAC when you do an upgrade. A lot of us installed beta versions of Refactor! When the RTM version came out, I installed the RTM version of Refactor!, but I had a DLL left over in the GAC. (Editors note: Again, this problem has since been solved. If you are using the latest version of Refactor! you will not experience this.)
DDJ: Ah, so some beta debris. Is anyone else running into common problems? Is anyone seeing lots of: "It did this weird thing once, I can't get it to repeat, but I just keep running into strange instabilities. I shutdown, and restart, and it's okay again for a while."
Kathleen: It's that, but it's more than that. I do a lot in C# and Visual Basic, and I see problems in both. I was a little surprised to hear that the 99-percent CPU problem has gone away. There's a similar problem, though not quite as severe, in C#. For me, the IDE comes up with a little gear icon, and becomes non-functional for 5-20 seconds. It does tend to come back in C#, which is different than the way the problem manifests itself in VB. There are also problems with references that are hard to track.
I have one problem in a form, which I've been unable to solve. I have a form that contains a treeview control. When I open that form in the designer, Visual Studio removes the designer generated line of code that instantiates the treeview. I have to manually put that line back in the designer code section every time I work on that form. There's definitely weird stuff that goes on in other corners of the product.
DDJ: Is it possible that a lot of the problems that people are experiencing are just a result of beta debris? I know that Microsoft provided an uninstall tool to try to help keep previous problems. Is it possible that if people do a clean install of Visual Studio 2005, that they won't see any of these problems?
Kathleen: No, this machine was built clean with Visual Studio 2005.
Billy H.:With my two laptops, one was a clean build, and one wasn't, and they both experience this drag and drop problem.
Bill V.: I'm with Kathleen. Mine are all clean builds to start with. My recent area of focus is a lot different than what I think a lot of other people are working with. I've been working with the CLR integration in SQL Server, using .NET languages to write stored procedures. I've crashed Visual Studio countless times. Most of the time, it's when I'm trying to do remote debugging, when I'm attached to the SQL Server process behind the scenes. (Editors note: Bill Vaughn has great information on troubleshooting connection problems here.) This works reliably about 90 percent of the time. But every so often, the system gets in a mode where it looks like it's starting remote debugging, but it gets lost and doesn't seem to know what to do. I thought I had traced it down to not assigning a default test script, but that doesn't always help. The only way out of this is to shut down Visual Studio. If you just try to stop debugging, that invariably crashes Visual Studio. I've also hit some new nuances that I can't reproduce after rebooting, where the debug manager crashes at the end of a test script. There are a number of things that are flakey. I'm also seeing the "Form is confused" issue now.
