Stop current operation in Visual Studio

Question

When using Visual Studio I often encounter situations when the IDE freezes while performing some operation. For instance, this frequently happens when I move next statement pointer (yellow arrow) during the debug session, when I unintentionally press F1, step into some low-level function that has multiple instantiations in the binary code etc.

In these situations Visual Studio notification balloon shows up in the tray with the following text:

Microsoft Visual Studio is Busy

Microsoft Visual Studio is waiting for an internal operation to complete. If you regularly encounter this delay during normal usage, please report this problem to Microsoft.

Often the delay is so long that it is faster to kill the Visual Studio process, start it over again, restart debugging session (or whatever else I was doing) and avoid doing an operation that has caused such a delay. However, this still takes too much time. I would like to have a way to stop/cancel the operation that is taking so much time. For instance, in Total Commander this is possible by pressing Esc during such an operation.

Is something like this possible with Visual Studio? Any plugins that allow doing it? Any other way to circumvent the problem?

P.S. Sorry for the lenghty description, but I wanted to explain the actual problem (not ask if certain solution is possible), so that people can think of ways to solve the problem.

P.P.S. Both 2008 and 2010 suffer from this problem.

Answer 1

If you're debugging, try hitting SHIFT-F5. This should stop the debugger, though probably not immediately, faster than what you've described. The program will process the keyboard a lot faster than trying to click menus with the mouse.

If you're building, try hitting CTRL-Break. Again, it may take a few seconds, but it usually comes around.

I've had the problem you mentioned a few years ago, but I can't remember what I ultimately did to fix it.

Answer 2

There may be many different causes of this issue, but for me apparently what was slowing it down was trying to load symbols from symbol servers. I unchecked the Symbol file (.pdb) locations in the Debugging\Symbols options and the problem went away entirely.