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Faster switch to design view in VS 2008 SP1 RTM

Some customers discovered that sometimes switch to Design view was very slow. We analyzed submitted reports and tracked the issue down to a code that was discovering available AJAX Extenders and which contols they were applicable to. In order to avoid unnecessary delays we moved discovery of AJAX extenders to a background thread. This made switch to Design view significantly faster since designer is now available immediately while extenders are still being enumerated. Here is a screenshot, look at the status bar that shows "Discovering AJAX extender controls..." and displays a small progress indicator:

If you select a control before applicable extenders are discovered, the control will not display its smart task menu and/or will not have "Add Extender..." menu item. 

Unfortunately, if control is selected, due to architectural limitations we cannot update its smart task availability. Therefore you may have to unselect and reselect the control in order to let it update its smart task menu.

Posted: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 11:35 PM by WebDevTools

Comments

Basketball Chat » Blog Archive » Faster switch to design view in VS 2008 SP1 RTM said:

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# June 18, 2008 9:03 PM

Tanveer Badar said:

Second picture shows 'Ready' in status bar. Slight ambiguity.

# June 19, 2008 12:30 PM

WebDevTools said:

It correct, second picture shows what happens when control was selected while discovery process was running, hence no smart tasks menu.

# June 23, 2008 6:18 PM

Rise of The Machines said:

My Design View tab freezes when I switch do DV.

Will SP1 solve this??

I recorded a movie of my problem:

http://vimeo.com/1322398

# July 12, 2008 11:55 AM

Sammy said:

This blog states SP1 is RTM now and all MSDN downloads list the SP as Beta? Can someone clarify this please?

Thanks

# August 7, 2008 2:42 PM

WebDevTools said:

The improvements mentioned in this blog are in SP1 RTM, which is not publicly available yet, but will be out in the very near future.  Hope this clarifies.

Omar Khan | Visual Web Developer

# August 7, 2008 2:59 PM

Visual Web Developer Team Blog said:

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1 are now available for download . This blog post

# August 13, 2008 2:45 PM

(Semi) Official Developer Division Performance Engineering blog said:

We just announced the release of Service Pack 1 for VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 . A major push for this release

# August 14, 2008 2:20 AM

James said:

I just installed the SP1 for VS2008 and .NET 3.5 and now my VS freezes when I try to switch a page to "Design View" from "Source View".  This happens for even a new project with a new aspx page that doesn't have any thing in it.

# August 14, 2008 4:18 PM

James D said:

I have installed Visual Studio 2008 Pro + SP1 + .Net3.5 SP1 using VB layout as default.

Opening a brand new web application project and switching to Design view freezes the whole package immediately - no dump, no errors, no event log entries - nothing. The only way I can get out of the freeze is to kill the devenv.exe process which interestingly is only running at 2 - 3% utilisation rather than the more common 100% utilisation during a freeze.

# August 20, 2008 7:09 AM

Chance said:

This is insane. SP1 was said to address these issues but the problems I am having got worse. I can hardly get anything done. Switching back and forth is extremely slow. Another issue is when I make a change in source view and save, it takes forever as well.

# August 21, 2008 8:23 AM

WebDevTools said:

Hello Chance,

I'm sorry to hear that you are running into the problem described.  In our general testing we did not find problems with switch to design view.  We would like to investigate the issue you are having, and hopefully resolve it for you.

Please send email to vwdperf-at-microsoft-dot-com, and we should be able to help.  Thanks again for bringing this problem to our attention.

Omar Khan | Visual Web Developer

# August 21, 2008 11:32 AM

WebDevTools said:

James D: can you obtain a debug dup from the frozen VS? In you are on Vista, go to Processes tab in the Task Manager, right click on devenv.exe and select Create Dump. Please zip it and e-mail to mikhaila-at-microsoft-dot-com. Thanks.

# August 22, 2008 5:03 PM

AP said:

Today, I installed the SP1 for VS 2008. And now my designer won’t event load the page.  Now switching to designer mode from html won't work.

Follwoing are my environment settings:

WIN XP

VS 2008 + SP1

Office 2007

SQL Server 2005

# August 28, 2008 11:06 AM

Amit007 said:

Thanks Mikhail, from micosoft, for solving the issue

To solve the switching problem in designer follow these steps.

1) uninstall Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component.

2) reinstall the Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component from DVD (look into WCU folder where you can find WebDesignerCore.exe).

I has the same issue, but after reinstalling the Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component solved my problem.

# August 28, 2008 3:48 PM

James D said:

Hi,

I was unable to get the debugger to register anything for the devenv.exe process or the setup.exe process. Unfortunately time was of the issue and after a couple of attempts at getting VS2008 to allow the design component to work (including a complete re- install of service pack3 and re-install of VS2008+SP1) I figured it was probably my machine as I had a couple of other separate software issues that were hanging around. After a complete re-install of XP, it's now running nicely.

The only problem that I had on installing after the rebuild was on inserting the VS 2008 DVD it kept crashing svchost.exe at 50%. I found that this was caused by the Sonic Record now package DLACTRLW.exe which needs to be removed from HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\current version\run

James

# September 3, 2008 8:38 AM

Ananth said:

Hi I just downloaded SP 1 for VS 2008. I am on Win Server 2003 SE, Office 2003, SQL 2005.

I also have VS 2003 - since all our applications are on Framework 1.1

Design view just doesn't work - it hangs indefinitely. I tried most of the fixes suggested:

1) Uninstalled and reinstalled Web Authoring component

2) Included the path for VWD before Office 11 in PATH under environment variables

3) Uninstalled and reinstalled VS 2008

Nothing works .. we're back to using VS 2003 and a wasted VS 2008 buy :(

# September 12, 2008 2:16 AM

WebDevTools said:

Ananth,

Sorry to hear that you are unable to use VS 2008 Sp1. We would like to investigate the issue you are having, and hopefully resolve it for you.

Can you obtain a debug dump from the frozen VS, zip it and send email to balach-at-microsoft-dot-com? For details on how to get the debug dump, please see this post http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/09/08/what-to-do-when-vwd-crashes-or-hangs-on-you.aspx

Thanks

# September 12, 2008 8:22 PM

Visual Web Developer Team Blog said:

Over the last few months we've collected information on various issues related to design view not working

# October 3, 2008 4:00 PM
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