I’ve been working with VS 2010 Beta 2 for a while now and while it works Ok most of the time it seems the environment is very, very fragile when it comes to crashes and installed packages. Specifically I’ve been working just fine for days, then when VS 2010 crashes it will not re-start. Instead I get the good old Application cannot start dialog:

Other failures I’ve seen bring forth other just as useful dialogs with information overload like Operation cannot be performed which for me specifically happens when trying to compile any project.

After a bit of digging around and a post to Microsoft Connect the solution boils down to resetting the VS.NET environment. The Application Cannot Start issue stems from a package load failure of some sort, so the work around for this is typically:

c:\program files\Visual Studio 2010\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /ResetSkipPkgs

In most cases that should do the trick. If it doesn’t and the error doesn’t go away the more drastic:

c:\program files\Visual Studio 2010\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /ResetSettings

is required which resets all settings in VS to its installation defaults. Between these two I’ve always been able to get VS to startup and run properly.

BTW it’s handy to keep a list of command line options for Visual Studio around:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xee0c8y7%28VS.100%29.aspx

Note that the /? option in VS 2010 doesn’t display all the options available but rather displays the ‘demo version’ message instead, so the above should be helpful. Also note that unless you install Visual C++ the Visual Studio Command Prompt icon is not automatically installed so you may have to navigate manually to the appropriate folder above.

Cannot Build Failures

If you get the Cannot compile error dialog, there is another thing that have worked for me: Change your project build target from Debug to Release (or whatever – just change it) and compile again. If that doesn’t work doing the reset steps above will do it for me.

It appears this failure comes from some sort of interference of other versions of Visual Studio installed on the system and running another version first. Resetting the build target explicitly seems to reset the build providers to a normalized state so that things work in many cases. But not all. Worst case – resetting settings will do it.

The bottom line for working in VS 2010 has been – don’t get too attached to your custom settings as they will get blown away quite a bit. I’ve probably been through 20 or more of these VS resets although I’ve been working with it quite a bit on an internal project.

It’s kind of frustrating to see this kind of high level instability in a Beta 2 product which is supposedly the last public beta they will put out. On the other hand this beta has been otherwise rather stable and performance is roughly equivalent to VS 2008. Although I mention the crash above – crashes I’ve seen have been relatively rare and no more frequent than in VS 2008 it seems. Given the drastic UI changes in VS 2010 (using WPF for the shell and editor) I’m actually impressed that the product is as stable as it is at this point. Also I was seriously worried about text quality going to a WPF model, but thankfully WPF 4.0 addresses the blurry text issue with native font rendering to render text on non-cleartype enabled systems crisply.

Anyway I hope that these notes are helpful to some of you playing around with the beta and running into problems. Hopefully you won’t need them :-}