Intellisense Crashing fix for VS 2010
[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]
We shipped the VS 2010 RC on Monday, and have seen some great feedback regarding performance and stability with it.
One issue, though, that we have seen a number of people run into is an intellisense crash that happens very frequently on machines that have UI Automation enabled and certain devices connected.
Crash Symptom
If you are encountering frequent VS 2010 crashes when you are typing in the editor while Intellisense is popping up and/or being dismissed then you are running into this issue.
Why does the crash happen?
The most common cause of the crash happening is that you are running a machine that:
- Is a Tablet PC (even if you aren’t using the pen)
- Has multi-touch screen drivers enabled
- Has an external input device like a pen or Wacom tablet
- Has a screen-reader enabled
It turns out that a late fix right before the RC shipped modified a UI input code path that unfortunately exposed this bug.
A patch is coming to fix this issue
We are working on shipping a VS 2010 RC patch that we’ll release next week that will fix the issue and prevent it from occurring. I’ll blog a pointer to the patch once it is available.
How to work around the issue now
There are two ways you can work around the issue now. One is to disable your Tablet services (read this article for details on how to do this) and/or disable Multi-touch/Pen drivers on your system. The other is to set a registry key.
You can read about both of these workaround in this VS Team Blog Post.
What if you still see crashes?
Please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) if you are still seeing any crashes after trying out these steps (or encounter crashes for non-Intellisense scenarios) – we’d like to make sure we investigate and follow-up any others you encounter.
Hope this helps,
Scott