How to handle Visual Studio 2010 Not Responding?

Question

First of all, I am not asking the same question here. ( This may be a duplicate post on Stack Overflow.) I have searched other solutions on MSDN, ASP .NET Forum, Stack Overflow, Code Project and everywhere on internet. But none of them solved my problem. These are the links that I found:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kirillosenkov/archive/2012/01/11/vs-hangs-for-1-minute-on-start-debugging-check-for-dead-symbol-paths.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/Questions/272109/Visual-Studio-2010-Hangs-When-Debugging-App

And a lot more...

My CPU is 4th Generation Intel Core i7 and memory capacity is 8 GB. I think it is more than recommended hardware requirements.

Problem: My visual studio hangs on these situations.

1. Opening a solution (Hangs for a minute when I open a file from solution explorer)
2. Running the debugging (Freezes consistently when I click on debug button) and
3. Stopping the debugging (Freezes immediately after the UI returns to the Developer layout after debugging)

I have tried the following steps:

1. I ensured that I deleted all the breakpoints in the solution.
2. I ensured that I am not using any resources from network drive.
3. I ensured Step over properties is enabled.
4. I ensured Enable .NET Framework source stepping is NOT enabled.
5. I start visual studio with SafeMode to suppress extensions
6. I cleared watch window.
7. I cleaned and rebuilt the solution.

Before I encounter this problem, I installed "Install Web Components" Visual Studio Add-In a few weeks ago. May be because of extensions and add-ins?

How can I do it to solve my problem?

Answer 1

If you suspect that Visual Studio settings get corrupted after installing "Install Web Component" bundle, why don't you try to reset the settings?

You can perform the steps below to reset Visual Studio settings:

1. Open Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010) under Start menu > All Programs > Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 > Visual Studio Tools (Run it with Administrator privilege: Right-click the program > Run as administrator)
2. Run devenv /Resetsettings to restore the IDE's default settings, optionally resets to the specified VSSettings file.
3. Run devenv /ResetSkipPkgs to clear all SkipLoading tags added to VSPackages.
4. Run devenv /Safemode to see if you can apply it correctly. This can eliminate the possibility that third party Add-ins or packages are causing problems.
5. Open your solution in Safemode and see whether it works.

Answer 2

Found this to happen also when the solution is connected to a Team Foundation Server and the service is not available at the moment, so the solution could not connect. In this case do not end the Visual Studio instance and wait until a message box show up giving the option to Go Offline. This is usually associated with the "Visual Studio is waiting for an operation to complete...." notification message.

Answer 3

My solution was simply to reload a saved GOOD (backup) copy of my settings (made a year ago). Worth trying before resetting everything to blank. My VS2010 would take 60 seconds to start debugging and approx. 3 minutes to stop debugging. I saved the corrupted settings and to my surprise they were over 3MB instead of 260Kb. I loaded the good backup copy and everything is great again :-)