Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

XUnit - Assert.Collection

A colleague asked me to take a look at the following code inside a test project: My first guess would be that this code checks that the specified condition(the contains) is true for every element in the list.  This turns out not to be the case. The Assert.Collection expects a list of element inspectors, one for every item in the list. The first inspector is used to check the first item, the second inspector the second item and so on. The number of inspectors should match the number of elements in the list. An example: The behavior I expected could be achieved using the Assert.All method:
Read more

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.
Read more

Angular --deploy-url and --base-href

As long you are running your Angular application at a root URL (e.g. www.myangularapp.com ) you don’t need to worry that much about either the ‘--deploy-url’ and ‘--base-href’ parameters. But once you want to serve your Angular application from a server sub folder(e.g. www.mywebsite.com/angularapp ) these parameters become important. --base-href If you deploy your Angular app to a subfolder, the ‘--base-href’ is important to generate the correct routes. This parameter will update the <base href> tag inside the index.html. For example, if the index.html is on the server at /angularapp/index.html , the base href should be set to <base href="/angularapp/"> . More information: https://angular.io/guide/deployment --deploy-url A second parameter that is important is ‘--deploy-url’. This parameter will update the generated url’s for our assets(scripts, css) inside the index.html. To make your assets available at /angularapp/, the deploy url should
Read more