Devenv.exe Hangs on Compile... Why?

[Selden McCabe]

Has anybody experienced this problem?
I have a solution that consists of 6 or 7 projects.
Every so often (2 or 3 times a week) when I click Run, everything builds
seemingly OK, but then, just when I would expect the app to start, nothing
happens, and the task manager shows devenv.exe sitting at 100% cpu, fixed
memory (about 127 Megs), forever. The only way out is to kill it from the
task list.

When this happens, I can usually fix it by deleting the OBJ folder under the
main project. But once in a while, this doesn't work. In those cases, I've
tried deleting ALL the OBJ and BIN folders under all the projects, and
sometimes it still happens.

So far, when I'm totally stuck like that, I delete the entire source tree
and get it again from Source Safe.

What is going on? How can I prevent this?

Thanks,
---Selden

 

[Brent Bordelon]

I had this problem at one point, and looked all over for a solution. I
found this somewhere from MS (I looked for it again before responding, but
could not find it - sorry). At any rate, they listed two possibilities,
both of which I had done. I followed the recommendations of both and the
issue was fixed for me. The two possibilities and their recommended fixes
are as follows:

1. Project A references the output dll of Project B. If this is the case,
Project A should reference the PROJECT, not the output dll.
2. You have changed the build output to a directory other than its default
(bin). Change the build output back to the default

Hope this fixes your problem, but I'm sure there are many other things that
could cause this problem
Brent

 

[Selden McCabe]

Thanks, Brent,

These are both useful things to know and remember the next time this
sort of thing happens.

In my case, neither of these was the culprit, but I eventually did find
a workaround. I'm not sure why it worked though. Here's what I did:

I created a new, empty solution, and one by one, added all the existing
projects to this new solution.

That was months ago and the problem has not come back.

Oddly, all the other team members are still using that original
solution, and none of them is experiencing this problem!

Hope this is helpful to anyone else if it happens to them.


---Selden