Visual Studio 2008 XAML designer crashes

There are several reasons why Visual Studio can crash.
- http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB963035
- http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB963676

and some other which I don’t remember now. But I am not going to talk about the above issues, rather about some other case when Visual Studio could crash.

Here is what happens.
Visual Studio Designer could create instances of some of the controls if for example you placed a child control on a form the base class for that child would be instantiated, similar if you have referenced external assemblies which have controls that are on a form, those controls could be instantiated, it depends on a control logic.

If you are creating a control you have to check for Design time compilation versus run-time. See my previous blog on how to handle it in Win Forms and there is plenty of topics on the web how to handle a similar issue for WPF.

Now if control resides in an assembly which is located on a shared or networking folder, then logic of that control would be executed in a different security context, and AccessDenied exception could be thrown. In my case Visual Studio was not handling this exception properly and was crashing. DWatson was executing and collecting crash data but that did help.

What should happen is VS IDE should handle such exception and cancel rendering with a proper message and type of the exception.

I solved it by copying all referenced assemblies into local project folder, then recompiling project and restarting Visual Studio IDE.

I usually copy assemblies for real projects. I ran into this problem by trying to create real quick prototype and was lazy to transfer dlls locally.

Try and let me know.
This was another ISolvable problem. I am sorry for being out of touch, but I will try to get back and post since I have a lot of things to share.