Visual Studio Hangs in WPF Design View - “.NET Run

Question

I've encountered an issue where Visual Studio hangs in WPF design view. I've read through similar posts and I believe my issue is similar, but different. The errors I see in Windows Event Viewer are below.

Hanging application devenv.exe, version 9.0.30729.1, hang module hungapp, version 0.0.0.0, hang address 0x00000000.

.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A2E0F92) (0)

I've noticed that the issue only occurs when I have the Properties window open during design view. Otherwise, everything works as expected. When I have the Properties window open the window gives the message below. It will then hang when I try to switch to XAML view or to another control.

Property editing not available.

In addition, I've noticed that putting the Properties window in auto-hide mode resolves the issue until I actually try to view the properties. It then hangs when trying to unhide the properties.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I ended up running the following to get a stack trace of Visual Studio when it was hanging:

adplus -hang -pn devenv.exe

adplus is part of the Microsoft Debugging Tools package. This showed me that Visual Studio was hanging in wpfgfx.dll. Since wpfgfx.dll is part of .NET 3.5 SP1, I decided to try and reinstall it and this resolved the issue for me.

The detailed stack trace info can be found in the Microsoft Connect ticket.