Visual Studio IDE hangs

After installation of DevPartner Studio I noticed that the Visual Studio IDE hangs from time to time. Here's my mail to the DevPartner product support team :

Hello,

the problem described below happened to me already twice on different computers. I would like to know if this is a known bug and if there's a workaround for this issue?

After installation of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite everything works fine, but after the installation of DevPartner Studio 8.1.313.0, the Visual Studio 2005 environment freezes after certain operations. Actually, the IDE freezes each time after a "progress pop-up" of Visual Studio 2005 was displayed. This behavior only came into play after the installation of DevPartner Studio.
Specific Example :

• open Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
• open Team Explorer and connect to a Team Foundation Server
• open Team Foundation Source Control and open a solution that's in Source Control
• edit a random code file
• undo check-out code file
• progress bar of undo check-out is briefly displayed
• IDE freezes

The only option now is to kill the Visual Studio 2005 process and to start over again! So, for each check-in or undo check-out a progress pop-up is briefly displayed and after that Visual Studio 2005 hangs. After an uninstall of DevPartner Studio, everything works fine again ...

Hoping for your quick feedback!

Pieter Gheysens
.NET Consultant
Professional Services Compuware Belgium

Their quick reply :

Hi Pieter,

As it turns out we've seen this before. It is a known bug within TFS. Microsoft has a fix available for this bug. (Microsoft KnowledgeBase #922989)

Customers can call Microsoft Support (800-936-5700), wait for a human being to answer, and specifically mention the fix for KB 922989. (They will email you a download link for the fix.)

Microsoft's thread on the subject can be viewed here.

If you have a trouble reaching Microsoft, there are a couple of ways install DevPartner and still workaround this issue.

• Don't have a solution open whenever you perform source control operations.
• Run a second copy of VisualStudio (with no solution opened) for source control.
• Team Foundation Server is only conflicting with ONE DevPartner module (Code Review); so, if you follow these steps, you will be able to use all DevPartner features except Code Review from within VisualStudio 2005.
  1. shut down VisualStudio
  2. go to your registry (e.g. Start menu, Run, regedit)
  3. navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Packages\{05B110B5-B90F-435e-BAB7-A2FC19F9A9E3}
  4. Rename this key by adding 3 dashes in front of the name like this ...\Packages\---{05B110B5-B90F-435e-BAB7-A2FC19F9A9E3}
  Then, when you start VisualStudio again, the CodeReview package won't load. You can re-enable Code Review at any time by removing the dashes and re-booting VisualStudio. Alternately, you can leave Code Review disabled in VisualStudio and still access its functionality using our command line interface. (For information on how to do this, access the Help in VisualStudio 2003 or VS2005 and navigate to DevPartner, Code Review, Running a Review from the Command Line.)

The change in the registry fixed my problem, but I want to stress some important points when you want to tackle this issue yourself :

• Microsoft has put this fix into their Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 which just came out. At this time the DevPartner Product is not supporting SP1!
• The new release of DevPartner (v8.1.1) also doesn't support the SP1!