Question

I am developing a Silverlight app using VS2008 Express. I have just implemented a new user control and have added it to a Grid.

When I try to open a XAML view which contains this control, VS crashes and restarts.

Where can I look for more information? Is there an event log in VS?

Update I found my problem which was a circular reference causing a … Stackoverflow. The logs didn’t help much – I had to read through the code in another editor and search for my bug.

Answer 1

First, look in the windows event log (app log). It will probably show a fastfail error message along the lines “NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 – Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A035E00) (80131506)”.“

To get more details on what caused it you can either attach another VS instance as a debugger and watch the debug output, or you can enable fusion logging since this is usually caused by assembly load errors.

One common cause of VS fastfails is a bug in .net 2.0 SP2 that is described in more detail here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=963676

Other workarounds (if the patch described in the MSKB article linked to above don’t work) are:

1) Running “ngen /delete *” (with administrative privileges, from the .net framework 2.0 directory).

2) An add-in I wrote that loads all referenced assemblies (and allows you to tweak the load order) whenever opening a project instead of as-needed. You can get it (and the source code for it) from here:
http://www.huagati.com/ProjectLoader/download/HuagatiProjectLoader.zip