phrosty

Hi all,

Myself and the developers that are working with me on our current project have been having a unique problem. For some odd reason, on sporadic occasions when starting a debug session, VS will build the solution, then close entirely, process and all, with no explanation or error message given. The upside is that it does save (as it performs a complete build); however, we're concerned that this might be a larger issue as we move toward deployment, as we're still uncertain what might be causing it.

Here's a few pertinent specs:

VS .net 2003
2 GB RAM
1.86 GHz processor
Loaded executable is about 48 Megs in size

And a few additional details that aren't used by every program:

References:

MS Word 11.0 Object Library
MS Excel 11.0 Object Library
ActiveX PDF Viewer
ActiveX SigPlus Library (from third party - Topaz Systems) - used for signatures
ActiveX MS Document Imaging Viewer (this control seems buggy to begin with so I suspect this may have some part in the problem)
Various CRv9 refs

Hopefully this will turn out to be a common bug, but my instinct tells me that it will be something obscure that nobody knows anything about. Hopefully this isn't the case; help!

Jayded

Ive personally never heard of that problem before and our systems run fairly smoothly. There are some known problems the toolstrip but they are generally design time. Also there have been known run time issues with command buttons and panels that execute code without being called. From what I can tell it is more than likely your references but its surprising that you dont get an error message and therefore suspect that it could be some compiled code that is causing a natrual shutdown.
How does your executable run? Does it access your references correctly?

phrosty

As far as I can tell, it does. The executable runs fine; I've only run it in Debug mode, but I've never had it terminate unexpectedly and unexplained like this situation with VS I'm experiencing.

The good news is that this has only happened to me once in the past week, so hopefully the problem will resolve itself, though I know better.

Thanks for the thoughts; I'll have to investigate some more!

phrosty

For anyone reading this, I've gotten some new information about the closing problem.

It seems that it has something to do with having the possibility of having a null object reference at runtime (you will receive warnings of this if you're using VS 2005) - declaring an object and attempting to use it later before first instantiating it by assigning it or using 'New'.

There are some instances that I've found where the program will warn you where the object has been assigned, but the program doesn't see it(the one I found most common was first assigning an uninstantiated string using a += or -= operator instead of =). In almost all instances, it's very easy to fix to get rid of the warning, so I won't delve into that.

Since I fixed all of these, I haven't had any unexpected shutdowns. I'm still mystified as to why it would compile successfully most times and shut down on others, but I guess that's only for Microsoft to know