What is this 'Waiting for Background operation

Question

Occassionaly, but fairly often, for no apparent reason, VS 2012 will lock up with a dialogue that says, "Waiting for a background operation to finish". E.g. this may happen during a plain old code edit, not on explicitly invoking any IDE command.

What causes this, and is there anything I can do about this?

I am running ReSharper 7, and I am not the only one I know experiencing this.

Answer 1

I experienced this problem while running visual studio in a virtual machine - Virtual Box 4.2 running on Mac OS X Mountain Lion, hosting a fresh Windows 7 install with nothing else installed but Visual Studio. I found that the problem was caused by 2 separate issues.

Firstly, my project was on a folder shared from the host OS. In other words, on the Windows Guest, my project appeared on a network drive. So opening the project in Visual Studio from a network drive seemed to cause this problem because the problem went away when I copied the project onto the C drive of the Windows VM and opened it in Visual Studio from the copy on the C drive.

Secondly, I began to experience the problem again when the hard drive on the virtual machine was getting full. I had about 1GB free space available on the hard drive. When I increased the size of the hard drive on the virtual machine, this issue went away.

Answer 2

I was having the same problem, especially in cshtml pages. I found this page: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2012/03/06/visual-studio-11-beta-razor-editor-issue-workaround.aspx that suggests changing the indent option in Tools > Options > Text Editor > HTML > Tab to Smart instead of Block. In my case it was already set to Smart and changing it back to Block fixed the problem.

Update: I was wrong, that didn't fix the dialogue, it just delayed it until I copied or pasted. What finally worked for me was to go to Tools > Import and Export Settings... > Reset all settings.

Possibly related question: Visual Studios 2010 - Asp.net MVC 4 Beta - long delays on paste and frequent crashing

Answer 3

i think i have found a clue! Every thing is ended to dcomcnfg.exe!

Open it and go under following path:

Component services>computers>my computer>dcom config

after click on dcom you'll see many warnings depend on amount of components on your pc.

Click yes on each message box in order to add correct record for dcom.

Answer 4

For me the fix was to update the Web Essentials 2012 to version 1.8.

The problematic version was 1.6

Answer 5

Tools > Options > Text Editor > HTML > Tabs -> Identing -> None settings solved this problem for me.

Answer 6

For me it seemed to be related with the razor syntax, since I only had it on one particular file.

For example if I put the following code in one line I had the described issue.

@section BodyClassName {note}

But when putting the closing parenthesis on the next line the issue went away

@section BodyClassName {note
}

Kind regards

Stijn