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Chris Wilcock
Senior Member
United Kingdom
26 Posts |
 Posted - Apr 09 2015 : 08:31:28 AM
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The latest two releases of Visual Assist seem to have stability issues in Visual Studio 6, when running on Windows 8.1
I am fairly certain that the problem is caused by Visual Assist, as this is the only thing that has changed in my otherwise previously stable development setup.
After a period of time editing in Visual Studio 6, the left-hand gutter margin suddenly fills with characters from other application windows, and the same effect is often visible on the right-hand vertical scrollbar. When this happens, it is no longer possible to type into the editor window, and attempting to scroll with the mouse wheel usually results in smearing of the source code text that was previously being displayed.
It is usually possible - thankfully - to hit Ctrl-Shift-S to save all open files, but the IDE is then out of action until it has been closed and restarted. The CPU usage also usually goes up very high when this happens.
I have tried reducing the number of projects in the solution from 150+ to around 30. I have also tried running the IDE in compatibility mode for Windows 7 and Windows XP SP3. This last action seems to make it more stable, but I cannot be sure, as it's pretty random when this occurs. I always run VS6 as an Administrator, and I have renamed MSDEV.EXE as suggested in several blog posts.
As I say, I am reasonably sure this is caused by Visual Assist, as this is the only thing that has changed since the previous trouble-free operation.
Thank you for taking the time to look into this.
Chris Wilcock
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Chris Wilcock |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18751 Posts |
Posted - Apr 09 2015 : 4:34:23 PM
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How many files do you have in your solution?
If you open VA's Open File in Solution dialog (Alt-Shift-O) the title bar contains two numbers. The first number is the number of files currently listed, which changes as you filter the list. The second number is the total number of files in the list, which is normally the number of files in your solution. What is this second number?
Did reducing the number of projects have any effect on this? This sounds similar to a known problem with VC6 that is caused by working with a large solution. VA has an effect on this, but it is not the root cause.
If this is the problem there are two possible workarounds:
1 - if you don't use the classview, create a read-only zero byte NCB file. This file is stored in the root directory of your solution and VC6 uses it to store its intellisense database. So close the IDE, delete the current NCB file and replace it with a zero byte read only file with the same name.
2 - disable the VA View and VA Outline - not guaranteed to solve the problem - depends on size of workspace. Done via:
VA Options -> C/C++ 6.0 -> Enable VA View and VA Outline |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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Chris Wilcock
Senior Member
United Kingdom
26 Posts |
Posted - Apr 10 2015 : 2:16:20 PM
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Hello Feline
Thanks very much for responding so quickly. The solution had 4,142 source files in it when the IDE first started misbehaving, spread over about 170 projects.
I've fallen foul of VS6 crashing with large projects in the past, so I moved 140 projects into another workspace, leaving 30 projects and 1,962 files in the main workspace. The IDE is crashing in the way that I described with both workspaces.
I will try your suggestions of using a zero-byte NCB file, and also turning off VA View and VA Outline, and report back if the problem persists!
Thanks again for your help!
Chris
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Chris Wilcock |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18751 Posts |
Posted - Apr 11 2015 : 9:27:27 PM
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This is a smaller number of files than expected for this problem, but it might still be the same problem. I know VC6 won't install under Windows 8 without having to jump through some hoops, so it is possible Windows 8 makes this more likely to happen.
It will be interesting to see if the work arounds have any effect here or not. Hopefully they will. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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Visual Studio 6 editor crashes
