BizTalk compiling consistently crashes Visual Studio

Question

I'm using BizTalk 2006 R2 and Visual Studio 2005. Occasionally, when I compile my solution, the IDE hangs indefinitely. No errors, no warnings, just goes into 'Not Responding' state and I have to kill the process and restart. Looking at the output, it is not happening at the same part of the compilation, it's seemingly random.

Does anyone have the same problem and know what it is? Alternatively, any good tools that I can use to diagnose what's going on?

Answer 1

I had a problem with one BizTalk solution going into a non-responding state as well (although this is BizTalk 2010 and Visual 2010). I finally got a clue as to why it was going into a non-responding state when I had DebugView from Systeinternals* running. It showed that it was going in a loop repeatedly adding one Project into the list to compile. This allowed me to find a workaround (removing the project from the solution and adding it back in just before compile).

• Note: It is such a good tool set that Microsoft bought them and renamed it Windows Sysinternals. Using DebugView with the BizTalk CAT Interstrumentation Framework allows for some very good debugging.

EDIT It looks to be the Capture Win32 that is picking up the Visual Studio compile. With that enabled I see things like

[5748] devenv.exe Information: 0 : 
[5748] Arranging the BTS modules in correct order 
[5748] devenv.exe Information: 0 : 
[5748] Adding module name Client.BT.Project.Orchestrations to the list 
[5748] devenv.exe Information: 0 : 
[5748] Sorting the list 
[5748] devenv.exe Information: 0 : 
[5748] List after sorting is 
[5748] devenv.exe Information: 0 : 
[5748]  Client.BT.Project.Orchestrations 
[5748] devenv.exe Information: 0 : 
[5748] Creating a module with the name Client.BT.Project.Orchestrations