Journey of a Software Developer

Now that VS 2008 has been released to MSDN Subscribers, I went ahead like everyone else to rush to download and install it.  Not to my surprise, the install went perfectly since I didn’t install any pre-release version on my machine. I leaned my lesson last time when VS 2005 was released and all the headaches I had then. However, once installed, I was unable to use VS 2008 because it kept crashing and providing me with an error of "Visual Studio encountered an unexpected error"  when trying to interact with any part of the user interface. I couldn’t even exit from the program. I had to keep killing the process.  I’m like great, your not the only one who this error caught unexpectedly.  So, I figured a reboot would take care of it since I didn’t bother to reboot after the install. Nope, didn’t work.  I did a repair. Didn’t work. So, I did a complete uninstall, then reinstall and still didn’t work.  So, at this point I am frustrated since about 2 or 3 hrs have already passed.

I then decided to do some debugging…yes debugging…and I decided to start Visual Studio in Safe mode. You can do that by choosing:

Start, Run and enter this command     devenv /SafeMode

OR

Execute the same command from the command prompt directly.

After doing this, Visual Studio worked fine. I could use the menus, bring up dialog boxes, etc.  So, I believe that running is SafeMode doesn’t load any add-ins or custom VSIP packages, and I suspected one of these were probably causing the issue.  I was right, I use VisualSVN for accessing my Subversion source control repositories through Visual Studio. Its a great tool and even thought it $50, I find it very useful and much better than anything I could get for free.

So, I uninstall VisualSVN, version 1.2.4 (I think), and started VS 2008 and everything worked perfectly.  I then proceed to the VisualSVN web site to download the latest version, installed, and the new version and VS 2008 worked nicely.

I hope this helped somebody even if you don’t use VisualSVN, there may be some other add-in that may cause similar issues with VS 2008. Until next time…

Happy Coding!