VS2008 partially freezing when switching to HTML design view

Question

This is an odd freeze. When I switch from source view to design view for an HTML or ASPX file, the client area freezes, but I can still click on other tabs and menus.

What am I missing here? Really don't feel like reinstalling VS2008.

Answer 1

I had the same problem, and found one resolution.

In VS 2008, In a page that was using a master page, the either frequency while working in source view or switching to design view, IDE would freeze for 10-20 seconds.

In my master template, I had references to the Google hosted JQuery, Jquery UI, and one or two more scripts off site. These were placed directly in my master page's head section.

I downloaded the js and then by deleting any offsite references, my IDE would be smooth again in both design and source mode.

I also discovered I could put the scripts inside my ToolkitScriptManager (I'm using AjaxControlToolkit) and added the Mode="Release", and could place the http://www.google.com references for the scripts. The IDE is still working fine for me.

Answer 2

This is often due to the Design mode downloading external resources that are timing out. As @JonK mentioned, for him it was jQuery references. I have seen this when the ConnectionString was set to production databases that could not be accessed on my development machine, even though I wasn't debugging (running) the site only editing code, it would still try to connect and because it couldn't it would stall waiting for the timeout.

VS2008 is mostly single-threaded for UI operations like this, so if it is downloading a slow or non-existent network path it hangs like this.

VS2008 can make all kinds of network requests, so these two examples may not solve it for you. The best way I have found to diagnose the problem is to use the Microsoft tool Process Monitor, filter by the Process webdev.exe, and watch for I/O requests that are long running and/or throwing errors. In my case, I could find the place that was having a problem because there would be a 20 second gap in between the hundreds of I/O entries in Process Monitor. Then, just back-tracked from when that gap began and I eventually found the request that was causing the problem.

This may not be possible for you, but if you can, an upgrade to VS2010 would help; it does a much better job of running process on multiple threads in more places so you don't have to worry about this as much.

Answer 3

Have you tried restarting your computer and then reopening your project?