David Gardiner - Visual Studio

Fatal error 0x8013132d debugging .NET 10 applications in Visual Studio

2026-04-10T12:00:00.000+09:30

Trying to debug an Aspire .NET 10 application in Visual Studio today and hitting this error:

A fatal error has occurred and debugging needs to be terminated. For more details, please see the Microsoft Help and Support web site. HRESULT=0x8013132d. ErrorCode=0x0.

A bit of searching online turned up this bug report on the Microsoft Developer Community site.

That was eventually forwarded to the .NET runtime repo on GitHub where it was identified as relating to a breaking change introduced in .NET 9

This change improves the security of .NET applications, but in this case is stopping me from being able to debug.

You can opt out of this new behaviour by adding the following property to your csproj:

<CETCompat>false</CETCompat>

Given in my case the problem only happens when I'm debugging, then it would be preferable to leave this new feature on by default, so I've added a condition to the property like this:

<CETCompat Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Debug'">false</CETCompat>

In my Aspire AppHost csproj file, the PropertyGroup element looks like this:

  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net10.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
    <UserSecretsId>00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000</UserSecretsId>
    <CETCompat Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Debug'">false</CETCompat>
  </PropertyGroup>

What's new in Visual Studio 2022

2021-10-28T08:00:00.000+10:30

I'm starting to compile some information for our next Adelaide .NET User Group meetup which is focusing on the launch of .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022.

First up, Visual Studio 2022. This is a consolidation of the points listed on the Visual Studio 2022 RC and Preview Release Notes. There's lots more detail on that page.

Once Visual Studio 2022 is launched (on November 8th), I'd expect https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/visualstudio/releases/2022/release-notes?WT.mc_id=DOP-MVP-5001655 to be updated with a final summary.

64-bit

devenv.exe is now 64-bit only

.NET 6 SDK

The .NET 6 SDK (preview) is included in Visual Studio 2022
This release has basic support for .NET MAUI projects. Temporarily you have to install the .NET MAUI workload separately from .NET 6. See our .NET MAUI installation documentation for more information

.NET Productivity

Introduce parameter refactoring can move a new parameter from the method implementation to its callers.
Track Value Source for data flow analysis
Option to underline variables that are re-assigned
Added search option in Generate Overrides dialog
Quick info for XML <code> tags now preserve whitespace and CDATA blocks
Find All References window will now group multi-target projects
Refactoring to remove repetitive types in Visual Basic
Go to Implementation will no longer navigate to members with abstract declarations that are also overridden.
Nullable reference types is now enabled by default for new .NET projects
C# 10.0 File-scoped namespace refactoring
Navigate to decompiled sources is now on by default
Refactoring to prefer null check over type check
XML comments will now automatically generate an <exception> tag when a method explicitly throws exceptions
Inheritance Margin is now enabled by default
Synchronize namespaces to match your folder structure from Solution Explorer
Configure background code analysis from Solution Explorer

Azure Cloud Services

Azure Cloud Service (classic) and Azure Cloud Service (extended support) projects are now supported.

C++

You can now build and debug natively on WSL2 without establishing a SSH connection. Both cross-platform CMake projects and MSBuild-based Linux projects are supported.
The v143 build tools are now available through the Visual Studio installer as well as the standalone build tools.
Visual Studio now supports the buildPresets.targets option in CMakePresets.json. This allows you to build a subset of targets in your CMake project.
The Project menu in CMake projects has been streamlined and exposes options to "Delete Cache and Reconfigure" and "View Cache".
Code analysis now enforces that return values of functions annotated with _Check_return_ or _Must_inspect_result_ must be checked.
LLVM tools shipped with Visual Studio have been upgraded to LLVM 12. See the LLVM release notes for details.
Clang-cl support was updated to LLVM 12.
C++ AMP headers are now deprecated. Including <amp.h> in a C++ project will generate build errors. To silence the errors, define _SILENCE_AMP_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS.
The new Hot Reload experience is now available to native C++ applications when running under the debugger. For more information see our Hot Reload section below.
CMake Overview Pages have been updated to support CMakePresets.json.
You can now configure and build your CMake projects with CMake 3.21 and CMakePresets.json v3.
You can now debug processes running on a remote systems from Visual Studio with LLDB.
Made improvements in C++ IntelliSense when providing navigation and syntax highlighting for types from imported Modules and Header Units. This is an active area of investment for us, please continue to share your feedback on Developer Community using Help->Send Feedback.
Improved C++ IntelliSense performance by optimizing cached header usage and symbol database access, providing improved load times to get into your code.
The IntelliSense Code Linter for C++ is now on by default, providing instant as-you-type suggestions and fix suggestions for common code defects.
Updated to NDK r21 LTS in C++ Mobile Development workload.
Added support for gsl::not_null to code analysis.
Support for libfuzzer under the switch -fsanitize=fuzzer.
Hot Reload for C++ now supports CMake and OpenFolder projects.
Implemented /scanDependencies flag for outputting C++20 module dependencies for CMake projects as described in P1689r3. This is a step towards support for building modules-based projects with CMake and we are working on completing this support in later releases.
We have improved null pointer dereference detection in our code analysis tooling.
We have upgraded the version of CMake shipped with Visual Studio to version 3.21. See the CMake 3.21 release notes for details on what is available.
The MSVC toolset now defaults to SHA-256 source hashing in debug records. Previously, the toolset used MD5 for source hashing by default.
The Game development with C++ workload now installs the latest Unreal Engine with support with for Visual Studio 2022.

Debugging & Diagnostics

Attach to process dialog improvements
Exception helper improvements
Force Run to Click
Memory Dump Diagnostic Analysis
Breakpoint Gutter improvements
Temporary Breakpoint
Drag and Drop Breakpoint
External Sources Node in Solution Explorer
Attach to process dialog improvements
Memory Dump Diagnostic Analysis
We have released a new type of breakpoint called Dependent Breakpoint, which allows you to configure a breakpoint to be enabled only if another breakpoint is first hit.
We have added more updates to the External Sources node, you can now see the module under the sub-node "Modules without Sources" and load the symbols form solution explorer itself.

Editor

Added subword navigation
Autosave is now available as a preview feature
Multi-caret copy/paste experience

Extensibility

VS SDK contains several breaking changes and Visual Studio 2019 extensions will not work in 2022. See VSSDK documentation for more information.
VS SDK Reference assemblies are no longer installed to the VSSDK\VisualStudioIntegration\Common\Assemblies folder. If your build was relying on these assemblies, please migrate your project to use NuGet packages instead. For offline scenarios:
- Keep an in-org nuget feed from which to restore the nuget packages.
- Check in the binaries.
Added ILanguageClient breaking change fixes
Removed APIs from Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.Client assemblies

Git Tooling

Removed the ability to revert back to the Team Explorer Git UI, making the new Git experience the only available built-in tooling.
Removed the option to install the GitHub extension from the Visual Studio Installer.
Basic multi-repo support under a preview flag for any Solution that spans different repositories (i.e. Solutions with projects hosted in different Git repositories)
Publish to Azure DevOps is now fully supported in the create git repository experience
Status bar enhancements including a new ability to view and open repositories from an empty VS
Commit details enhancements including a more responsive and user friendly UI
The overflow menu on the Git Changes window is now available for local only repositories with additional git operations

Help Menu

During 17.0 we have remodelled the Help Menu! The updated menu highlights Get Started material and helpful Tips/Tricks. It also provides more collaboration with our development team by adding things such as access to Developer Community, Release Notes, the Visual Studio product Roadmap, and our Social Media pages. We want developers to make the most out of their subscriptions so check out your subscription benefits and other details via the new My Subscription menu item!

Hot Reload

.NET Hot Reload is now available in Visual Studio 2022 when running your app using the debugger (F5) through the new 'apply code changes' button. With Hot Reload you can edit your running applications code files and, in many cases, - apply those code changes without having to first pause the apps execution (as was previously required by edit and continue capability). With Hot Reload our goal is to save you as many app restarts as possible between edits, making you - more productive by reducing the time you spend building/restarting your application as you continue to build your app.
Hot Reload (for both .NET and C++ code) makes it possible to make many types of code edits to your running app and apply them without needing to pause the apps execution with something like a breakpoint. In this release we continue to - improve this feature, highlights include: Support for C++, .NET Hot Reload when running without debugger (CTRL-F5), support for more types of edits and more.
.NET/C++ Hot Reload - Various changes such as more supported edits, improvements for ASP.NET developers improvements to CTRL-F5 scenario and more.
Improvements to user experience (new button with options), apply changes on save and settings
Support for Hot Reload .NET MAUI apps (iOS, Android and WinUI)
Improvements to ASP.NET scenarios
More edits now supported
XAML Hot Reload
- XAML Hot Reload Changes - Minor changes to in-app toolbar and settings
- Improved support for XAML Hot Reload for .NET MAUI apps
- Improved support for using both XAML and .NET Hot Reload in the same session for WPF and WinUI apps

IntelliCode

Whole line auto completion

JavaScript/TypeScript

We have released a new JavaScript/TypeScript project type that builds standalone JavaScript/TypeScript projects with additional tooling. You will be able to create Angular and React projects in Visual Studio using the framework version installed on your computer.
NPM GUI available, so you can now download NPM modules the same way you download Nuget packages

Programming languages

C#10

Razor (ASP.NET Core) Editor

Hot Reload support in Razor files
Performance improvements
Formatting and indentation enhancements
New Razor editor colors
TagHelpers are now colorized and have quick info classification support and completion tooltips
Angle brace highlighting and navigation for Razor constructs
Comments now have auto-completion, smart indentation, auto-inclusion of commenting continuations, and block - comment navigation
Reduced UI freezes and improved performance on solution startup
Faster semantic colorization up to 2x in some solutions
F7 (view code) support in Razor files
Snippet support in razor files which will complete a snippet session with a single tab instead of pressing - tab-tab
Better formatting in @code blocks when there's nested HTML and Razor Components

Test tools support

New versions of the test platform starting with 17.0 will not be able to run Generic tests and Ordered tests. These specific features only shipped as part of an early version of MSTestv1 and are not included in MSTestv2. We see very low usage of these features and ordered tests is now considered contrary to best testing practices.
Some test experiences will not be available in 17.0 Preview 1 including creating new TestSettings files and the TestSettings editor. Test runs will still be able to use TestSettings files, however TestSettings was replaced with RunSettings and we encourage users to migrate improved performance and functionality. Read more.
Coded UI Tests and Web Load Tests support will not arrive in 17.0 preview 1 as we are still working on porting these experiences to Visual Studio 2022. We do plan to support them in subsequent previews, though we strongly encourage users to move off Coded UI Test and Web Load Test. These technologies were officially deprecated in 2019 and we do plan to remove them from the product when we can minimize the impact to users.
Hot reload is now available in your test experience! Speed up your test runs by not requiring full builds in between test runs after minor code edits.
Remote Testing - Debugging remote environments connected with docker and wsl is now available. You can also debug over SSH connections if you are connected to linux. For setup instructions see the details in the Preview 2 release notes.
Show in Test Explorer
Web Load Test and Coded UI Test support updates

Toolbox population for UWP Extension SDKs

UWP Extension SDKs are now required to explicitly declare the types that they wish to appear in the Toolbox by listing them in their SdkManifest.xml file. The behavior of older versions of Visual Studio is unchanged; they will ignore the list of controls in the manifest and instead dynamically enumerate the control types in the SDK's assemblies.

Trusted Locations

We have revamped the “Trust Settings” functionality and can now show a warning whenever untrusted code (e.g. files, projects or folders) is about to be opened inside the IDE.
Added support for Git repositories as trusted locations
Trust checks are now done at the solution folder level
User created projects are automatically added to the trusted list
Users can skip trust checks on temporary locations created by Visual Studio
Added Group Policy support as a way to manage the trust functionality

User Interface

The default icons have been updated and refreshed.
As part of our goal to refresh the user interface for Visual Studio 2022, the default dark theme has been refreshed to improve contrast and assist in navigation and way-finding.
You can now sync your Visual Studio theme with your Windows OS theme - if you have a Light system theme, Visual Studio's theme will be Blue. If you have a Dark system theme, Visual Studio's theme will be Dark. This can be enabled via Tools > Options > General > Use system settings.

Web Tools

The Publish summary page now has actions to start / stop remote debugging and profiling under the '...' menu on the top right corner of the 'Hosting' section
The Connected Services page now has an action to launch Storage Explorer
The "ASP.NET Core Empty" template that comes with .NET 6 is using the new 'minimal APIs' paradigm for which we have started to add support

WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework

The current WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework is replaced with a new WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework, based on the same architecture used for the WPF XAML Designer for .NET (.NET Core).
The Visual Studio experience will look the same, but third-party control vendors need to support the new extensibility model since the previous model based on .design.dll and Microsoft.Windows.Design.Extensibility is deprecated. If you already created a .designtools.dll extension for .NET (.NET Core), that same extension will work for the new WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework.

XAML Live Preview

XAML Live Preview is now available for WPF developers as a first preview of this new experience. With Live Preview we enable the ability to capture a desktop apps UI and bring it into a docked window within Visual Studio, making it easier to use XAML Hot Reload to change the app and easily see the changes as you make them. This feature improves the XAML Hot Reload experience on a single screen device, while also making it possible to polish the apps UI with tools such as deep zooming, rulers, element selection and info tips.
Support added for .NET MAUI & Xamarin.Forms apps (Android Emulator)
Support added for WinUI 3 and UWP apps

XAML Sample Data

Design-Time Sample Data will now be added by default when creating DataGrid, ListBox, and ListView controls from the toolbox in WPF applications. To disable this behaviour, uncheck ‘Automatically add sample data on element creation’ under Tools -> Options -> XAML Designer.

Microsoft Build 2020 highlights

2020-05-20T08:30:00.000+09:30

Microsoft Build 2020 started early this morning. I've never had the opportunity to attend the US Build conference in person, so the fact that this year they're running it as a virtual conference for free is awesome! Here's a few of the highlights and announcements that have stood out to me so far:

Windows Terminal 1.0 released. I've been using Windows Terminal for a few months now and it's become my go-to command-line environment.
WSL2. WSL2 ships with Windows 10 20-04. I made the jump to the Slow Ring to check out WSL2 on my new workstation. There's a few rough edges around running mixed containers (Windows and Linux at the same time) so hoping those get sorted out when it goes GA. Interesting that they're adding GPU support to WSL2 as well.
Blazor WebAssembly is now officially released. I haven't played with this at all but it's on my radar.
Visual Studio 2019 v16.6 & v16.7 Preview 1 - Time to spin up the Visual Studio Installer and make sure you're running the latest GA and Preview bits. Watch the recording of me exploring some of the new features in 16.6 which was run as an event of the Adelaide .NET User Group.
.NET 5 Preview 4 - The next version of .NET Core, now just called '.NET' and skipping v4 to avoid confusion with the old .NET Framework. Some nice performance improvements as well as the next versions of C# and F#.
Teams support for NDI - this will be of interest to those wanting to use OBS or similar live video production applications with Microsoft Teams.

It's going to be a challenge getting my regular work done as well as keeping an eye on all the sessions that are running today and tomorrow. Fortunately, sessions that I miss will be up on Channel 9 to watch at a more convenient time.

Using the Developer PowerShell Visual Studio with PowerShell 7

2020-04-27T09:00:00.000+09:30

One of the nice new features introduced in Visual Studio 2019 16.2 was the Developer PowerShell for VS 2019 - a nice accompaniment to the existing cmd.exe based Developer Command Prompt for VS 2019.

I use PowerShell as much as possible, and for a long time now I've made a habit of updating my profile.ps1 so that all the Visual Studio tools are available from the PowerShell command prompt. Previously this required running the old VsDevCmd.bat batch file and capturing the environment variables it set to then bring them into the PowerShell process. You can see an example here.

But now there's first class support for integrating Visual Studio tooling into your PowerShell environment.

If you take a look at the Windows Start Menu shortcut that's added, you'll see it's defined with a target similar to this:

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -noe -c "&{Import-Module """C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell.dll"""; Enter-VsDevShell f9f5056f}"

With the release of PowerShell Core 6, and now PowerShell 7, I'm now favouring these latest releases of PowerShell over the 'legacy' Windows PowerShell 5.1. The problem was until recently, the assembly you see referenced in the shortcut above only worked in Windows PowerShell. It wasn't compatible with PowerShell Core. Pleasingly this was fixed in Visual Studio 2019 16.5.

So now in your PowerShell 7 profile, you can add:

Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell.dll"
Enter-VsDevShell -InstanceId 9034d7ab

And you'll get the full DevShell experience:

There's just one catch - notice that InstanceId? That's unique for every machine. You can either grab the value out of the properties of the Start Menu shortcut, or run vswhere -property instanceId which will return the instanceId of the newest instance of Visual Studio.

Skeet, Cogan and VS 2017 launch date announced

2017-02-10T21:23:00.001+10:30

It’s been a busy week!

On Wednesday evening we hosted the regular monthly meeting of the Adelaide .NET User Group in the Adelaide offices of RL Solutions. Our speaker was to be Jon Skeet talking about C# 7, joining us remotely from the UK. This involved a bit of logistical planning, including getting in enough seats for the expected crowd, getting a good PA (thanks Tom!), borrowing a nice data projector (thanks Keith!) and making sure everyone could get into the building after hours (thanks Vic!).

There were a few gotchas along the way – I’d remembered the front door to our building closes at 6pm, but forgot that the lifts required a security card from 5.30pm. Then my laptop decided to freeze its screen when I reconnected the data projector and tried to launch PowerPoint as we were about to start. We got everyone upstairs and I rebooted my laptop and Jon was able to present his talk. I then realised that the pizzas were going to be delivered too early. So a quick change of schedule to introduce a 5 minute interval in the middle of the talk so everyone could grab some food before continuing on with part 2. Not to mention Tom running out to get some disposable plates as I’d overlooked those too.

But in the scheme of things, they were all pretty minor. All in all, I think it was a pretty successful night and I think lots of positive comments about Jon’s talk and also our office (the bar was especially popular!)

We recorded the Hangout so you can watch Jon’s presentation:

Friday afternoon is not when we’d normally have a user group meeting, but Adam Cogan was keen to visit and give us a preview of his Ignite Conference talk on What’s New in Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Code. The timing of Adam’s talk turned out to be quite good, as Microsoft have just announced the release date for Visual Studio 2017. Set your alarms for 2.30am on March 8th (Adelaide time) for a live streaming launch event.

I’ve already got two speakers (Ben Laan on Load Testing and Bronwen Zande on HoloLens) lined up for March, so I think we’ll make April’s meeting our local Adelaide launch event for VS 2017 (combined with Jack Ni on IoT).

It’s going to be a busy year!

Servicing SQL Server vs Visual Studio

2011-01-27T06:44:00.001+10:30

It's interesting to consider the approach that the SQL Server team take to servicing their products and contrast that with the Visual Studio team.

There are currently 3 versions of SQL Server covered under mainstream support (4 if you count extended support for SQL Server 2000 SP4 until 9th April 2013):

SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2008
SQL Server 2008R2

and we know that 'Denali' is in the works as the next version.

Current service packs include:

Service Pack 4 for 2005 (released in December 2010)
Service Pack 2 for 2008 (released in September 2010)

In addition, 'Cumulative Updates' are also released at regular intervals, and most impressively these also cover multiple service packs for the same RTM versions. As the name suggests, these updates contain all of the hotfixes released since the applicable release. For example the latest cumulative updates include:

Cumulative Update #2 for 2008 SP2
Cumulative Update #12 for 2008 SP1
Cumulative Update #1 for 2005 SP4
Cumulative Update #5 for 2008 R2 RTM
Cumulative Update #13 for 2005 SP3

You can go to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlreleaseservices/ to see all the details.

Now contrast this with current mainstream supported versions of Visual Studio:

Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio 2008
Visual Studio 2010

There's been single service packs for 2005 and 2008. There's also currently a beta for the 2010 service pack. To the best of my knowledge they've never released additional service packs for any of the '.NET era' VS versions.

Additional updates are released but in very much a piecemeal fashion. It's up to you to look trawl through the items posted to the Connect site or on MSDN and do your research by then trying to look up KB articles as the original descriptions aren't always that descriptive.

I guess what I'm saying is it wouldn't it be great for the VS team to take a leaf out of the SQL team's book and provide a greater commitment to servicing their existing products as well as innovating on the next release – provide proper cumulative updates for current VS releases.

SQL 2008 RC0 misery

2008-08-05T09:17:00.001+09:30

On my old (and slow) work PC I had installed SQL 2008 RC0 and it worked fine.

I tried to install it on the new box and it has ended up causing me grief. The first indication that all was not well was when I tried to launch Visual Studio 2008 after SQL installation had completed. I was greeted with the following error:

"Package 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Xaml' has failed to load properly"

Googling this error unfortunately didn’t give any ways to fix it, apart from reinstalling VS 2008.

So that’s what I did. I got rid of all the Visual Studio and SQL products using Add/Remove.

I then also fired up RegEdit and deleted their registry settings and clobbered their Program Files directories just to make sure. Reinstalling took a few hours, but was uneventful.

I then fired up Visual Studio again, only to see this new error when I tried to run our project

Unable to load DLL 'wpfgfx.dll'

It appears this is caused by some remnants of .NET 3.5 SP1 beta not being removed.

Rather than repeat the whole install process again, this time I just uninstalled all the .NET frameworks, used this tool to make sure, then finally clobbered the c:\windows\assembly and c:\windows\microsoft.net folders, before re-installing .NET 3.5 again.

Because some of Visual Studio’s assemblies would also have been clobbered, I then did a Repair.

All seemed ok, until I tried to use SQL Management Studio. Of course it had some managed assemblies too, but unfortunately I couldn’t see a way to repair it. Instead I uninstalled all the SQL bits again and reinstalled them.

Now everything appears to be back to “normal”.

Weird Visual Studio 2008 error of the day

2008-02-18T12:37:00.001+10:30

A strange error, and it won't let me close Visual Studio, so I'm going to have to kill it. No idea what triggered this.

Release version of Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects (WDP)

2008-01-29T09:35:00.001+10:30

Microsoft have published the "Released To Web" version of the Web Deployment Projects. I haven't tried it out yet, but it should fix the problems with the CTP from November/December.

Visual Studio Cube

2007-12-14T09:53:00.001+10:30

I got a nice Christmas present this morning - my "thanks for testing Visual Studio 2008" cube arrived. It doesn't do much but it is pretty.