Help for Visual Studio Crashes
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his latest post offering some resources for Visual Studio crashes.
Since the release of Visual Studio 2017, some users have been reporting crashes. In most cases, Microsoft folks offer workarounds and promises of fixes to come in the next patch or the next release.
But while you may expect a fix, it may not be a quick fix.
"I can see no apparent reason, but VS keeps crashing very often," one user reported on March 17, 2017 on the Visual Studio Developer Community help page. "It's practically unusable. I can see no pattern either. The window freezes and after a while Windows says it is not responding and restarts VS."
It took until April 20 for a workaround to be posted.
"We were able to isolate this to the pen/touch driver for dotnet crashing. (penimc.dll)," a Microsoft support person wrote. "We're working on this issue. You can try reinstalling .NET support in VS using the installer, or try disabling pen/touch support. I know these are not great workarounds and I'm not sure they'll actually avoid the issue for you - but we're looking into the underlying problem."
By May 11, there was an official Microsoft report on the issue.
Visual Studio may freeze or crash when running on a pen-enabled machine told developers: "Under certain conditions, Visual Studio may terminate unexpectedly (a freeze / hang followed by a crash) when running on a pen-enabled machine with Windows 10 Creators Update, or other Windows versions when Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7 is installed. This issue affects all versions of Visual Studio."
On June 6, in the comments section under that article, a Microsofter reported: "Thank you for your feedback! We have fixed the problem in an upcoming release. Thank you for helping us build a better Visual Studio!"
So if you have a major problem with crashes there will eventually be a solution but it is unrealistic to expect a quick solution.
This particular crash issue possibly is a result of new hardware, in this case the pen-enabled Windows 10 machines, meeting new software, Visual Studio 2017. This is why prudent IT professionals often wait for version 2 of almost everything. But some adventurous developers like to be on the leading edge and take the chance that it may also be the bleeding edge. (as Wikipedia defines it "Bleeding edge technology is a category of technologies so new that they could have a high risk of being unreliable …")
It is probably not fair to make it sound like crashes are a common or frequent problem with Visual Studio.
"I am pretty sure that I have never seen Visual Studio crash,” says one longtime Visual Studio user. He did recall that several years ago he heard about stability problems causing crashes with a specific release of Visual Studio and that it was fixed with a Microsoft patch.
Of course, if you’re experiencing crashes, it will not do much to relieve your frustration to know that lots of other developers are coding away without a care in the world while your project falls farther and farther behind.
The best thing to do if your Visual Studio is misbehaving is to ask for help.
"Get help from our community supported forum,” reads the tag line on the Microsoft Developer Community page, where the crash reports above were hashed out between users and Microsoft support people.
Another place to go is GitHub where you can follow the instructions explained in How to Report a Problem with Visual Studio 2017, which is encouraging: "If you encounter a problem with Visual Studio, we want to know about it so that we can diagnose and fix it. By using the Report a Problem tool, you can collect detailed information about the problem and then send it to Microsoft with just a few button clicks."
When you use the Report a Problem tool, you may discover that you are not alone in having this trouble. In that case, the tool allows you to "up vote." Presumably the more votes a specific problem gets the more likely it will come to the attention of someone at Microsoft who might have a fix or at least a workaround.
And some problems actually do have a quick fix if you report it.
For example, one user downloaded Visual Studio 2017 but found that the Help Viewer, of all ironic things, was missing. After updating versions, this user wrote on a Visual Studio General Questions page: "Could you please let me know whether help viewer is available for Visual Studio 2017."
The fix turned out to be as simple as going to Individual Components on the Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 installation section and checking the box for Help Viewer.
So the good news is there is help even when you can’t find the Help Viewer.
Posted by Lafe Low on 08/17/2017