Debugging Visual Studio issues

After upgrading to the latest Visual Studio version, I started to get issues. Everytime I opened up Visual Studio it closes after a few seconds without any message or warning. What is going on?

Safe Mode

The first thing I tried is running Visual Studio in safe mode using the following command:

devenv /safemode

This will start Visual Studio in safe mode, loading only the default environment and services. This is especially useful if you suspect that the problem is coming from a rogue extension or plugin. This switch prevents all third-party VSPackages from loading when Visual Studio starts.

But alas, this time it didn’t help, so let’s try a different approach.

The Activity Log

So how else can we find out what is going wrong? A second option we got is to log all Visual Studio activities in the Activity Log. To enable this run Visual Studio using the following command:

devenv /log

After Visual Studio has closed, you can find the logged activities at the following location:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<Version>\ActivityLog.xml

where <Version> is the Visual Studio version.

The ActivityLog.xml has a corresponding xslt file and can be visualized using Microsoft Edge:

I scrolled through the log file and just before it starts the closing activities, I noticed the following warning:

Aha, there is something wrong with my Visual Studio license. We’ll fix this in our next post.

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...

The art of simplicity

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