VS2010 patch for Cut and Copy "Insufficient Memory" issue

The Visual Studio 2010 Editor team has released a hotfix to reduce the frequency of the annoying error of VS2010 displaying the error message that there is "insufficient available memory to meet the expected demands of an operation at this time..." that can occur when trying to cut or copy text to the clipboard.

After upgrading to VS2010 a month ago this error plagued our project incessantly. The previous workaround for the team has been to use Steve Harman's documented hack for VS2008, but on the VS2010 executable (http://stevenharman.net/blog/archive/2008/04/29/hacking-visual-studio-to-use-more-than-2gigabytes-of-memory.aspx) which seemed to work.

The official Microsoft hotfix can be downloaded here https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=29729

VS2010 and Resharper 5.0 performance - KB974417

On my current project we have upgraded our solution from VS2008 to VS2010. I'm a big user of Resharper 5.0 in VS2008 and have it also installed in VS2010.

However when the solution was loaded Resharper would completely lock up VS2010 and eventually crash. Disabling Resharper 5.0 didn't help much (phew! can't live without Resharper), but the problem still remained.

The VS2010 IDE became very unstable for our WPF and heavily resourced solution targeted at .Net 3.5. Visual Studio would regularly crash (say every 10 minutes) with an Out of Memory exception of some kind. If it didn't crash then the build would fail with some out of memory or not enough resources message.

Fortunately in the Event Viewer there was this particularly unhelpful message:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: .NET Runtime Optimization Service
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1103
Description:
.NET Runtime Optimization Service (clr_optimization_v2.0.50727_32) - Tried to start a service that wasn't the latest version of CLR Optimization service. Will shutdown

This error seems to relate to a failed or corrupted installation of KB974417 - which applies when .Net 4.0 framework is installed.

There are two ways to fix this. One or both may work for you.

The first is to manually install the update via the Geek Lab article.
The second is to remove the conflicting update and then reinstall:

1. Uninstall update KB976569 manually through Add/Remove programs.
2. Download KB974417 for your platform and install it.
3. Re-install KB976569

If you don't have KB976569 installed to start with then it is possible to resolve this issue by installing KB976569 then following the steps above.

Problem solved! Enable Resharper and code away.

VS2008 and .Net 3.5 SP1 released

Today Microsoft released the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1.

What a great milestone! Hopefully this signals a new level of maturity and stability in these two technologies. Some organisations that I have associated with have been somewhat reticent to embrace .Net 3.5 as it is still perceived as too bleeding edge.

That aside, .Net Framework 3.5 has a great uptake in developer participation due to the exciting new framework and language features that it introduces. There is great buzz in the development community around MVC, Linq-To-Sql, Dynamic Data, Lamba expressions, ASP.Net AJAX, support for Astoria, ASP.Net Entity Framework, partial methods and so on. The speed at which these new technologies and frameworks are appearing is very rapid. What's more is that these features have led to whole new areas of application and platform design options that are easier to implement, reuse and maintain.

I believe this is a really exciting time to be involved in using these tools to develop applications. It reinvigorates the community.

What changes in SP1 do you think will be most beneficial to you?

.Net 3.5 SP1 Overview
ASP.Net Debugging

Combined Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
.Net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (no VS2008 SP1)

Adding Pre and Post build events to Web Projects

It is amazing how often I come across things in Visual Studio that seem like they should be simple enough.

Recently, one such thing was adding a post-build event to a Web Project. Of course the first place to look is the project properties. But there is no sign of it there. A little odd, why shouldn't I be able to have events on my build for a Web Project?

You can! A quick investigation of the .csproj project file in your project path shows the PreBuildEvent and PostBuildEvent configuration values sitting there. And you can edit them with your favorite editor and add in you pre and post events as you wish.

To easy - when you don't try to use the Visual Studio IDE!

<VISUALSTUDIOPROJECT>
  <CSHARP>
    <BUILD>
      <SETTINGS>
        <!-- Your Build Events Here -->
        PreBuildEvent = ""
        PostBuildEvent = ""
        <!-- RunPostBuildEvent = "Always" | "OnBuildSuccess" | "OnOutputUpdated" -->
        RunPostBuildEvent = "OnBuildSuccess"
      </SETTINGS>
    </BUILD>
  </CSHARP>
</VISUALSTUDIOPROJECT>

VS2003, ASP.Net and Subversion

Subversion and the ASP.Net Hack

I was recently converting the source control for a product over to SubVersion and this little funny came up. The problem is with directories in the ASP.Net Web Project folder that start with a '.' - directories such as .svn.

Now with that minor inconvenience it is not possible to load the Web Projects into Visual Studio 2003. Luckily the developers of Subversion have coded around Microsoft's stupidity by adding a compatibility flag for the Windows version of Subversion. Set the SVN_ASP_DOT_NET_HACK environment variable in your profile to the value '*' and re-checkout all of your code. The .svn directories will have become _svn directories.

One gotcha is that this is only supported in the Windows version of Subversion. Just be aware that using any other platform on your 'Windows-fied' checkout directories won't work!

Of course you can always avoid the problem by steering away from Web Projects and implementing web solutions as standard class libraries.