Ran into a real pain in the @ss today. While working with Team Foundation Server I was refactoring a couple of projects and at one point I needed to "Undo" my changes. This is normally accomplished by what you see on the left.

Well, to my dismay, as soon as I clicked on that button, Visual Studio 2005 would HANG. I mean, it would just stop. The only way to get it to respond (and yes this is odd)  was to go to Task Manager, then right click on the application (on the Applications tab) and then click "Minimize" then click "Maximize" and the app would respond. Unfortunately the "Undo" didn't happen though.

I looked all around the net, and couldn't find anything. I did the following...

devenv /resetskippkgs (didn't work)

devenv /resetsettings (or something like that - anyway - it didn't work)

I also installed hot fixes that seemed to be related to this problem. Didn't work. Reboot - didn't work. Installed last nights updates - didn't work.

I repaired Team Foundation Explorer - didn't work.

As a last resort I decided to take VS2005 back to its clean slate state by firing off this command. This command is kind of hidden and is not supported by Microsoft (details - all the way at the bottom of that link).

Fix: devenv /resetuserdata

MSDN - Disclaimer: you will lose all your environment settings and customizations if you use this switch. It is for this reason that this switch is not officially supported and Microsoft does not advertise this switch to the public through devenv /? command.

After I fired that bad boy off, waited a few minutes and fired up VS2005 and everything worked again. Thank the big baby jeebus for not having to re-install VS2005 or use a MS Support call. 

I was creating a solution file for an application at a client and I got this error message.

Sara Ford explains why this happens here. The OS limit is 260 chars for the MAX_PATH variable according to Sara Ford's blog.

So how do you get around it? In this case, Visual studio was creating a folder for my solution. So I just created a solution somewhere else on the system and copied it over to my destination folder. I knew that the files wouldn't be exceeding the 260 character limit anytime soon so it wasn't a problem.

But what if you do need to exceed the file path? Easy, create a file share. Share a folder as a new drive on your machine, then create the solution on the new share (its still in the old folder) but you're referencing it with the new path. Kind of a kludge, but it works.

Sara Ford posted a blog entry (which I got from the VS2008 Tip of the Day Gadget on Vista) which made me slap my forehead and say "... #$@#! why didn't I find that before."

Pretty much, you can show syntax highlighting for custom file extensions.

When I make build files, I like to name them .build or .msbuild (depends on whether its a NAnt script or MSBuild script).

Previously, I would edit my build script in Notepad++ and set the style to XML for syntax highlighting. It worked well, but I hated having to leave Visual Studio to edit my build file with nice pretty colors.

Now, with this tip (see the link above) I have set my build file extensions to open with the XML Editor.

Here's what I did:

Now when I open the build files I get the pretty colors.

Oh how the simple things impress me at times. I just wish I knew about this before. It just goes to show you that Visual Studio is a very in depth program.

Thanks for the tip Sara!