I found a solution myself and I wanted to share it here, hoping that it might save someone quite a few hours of research and staring at the "Preparing solution..." dialog.
When inspecting the devenv.exe process with Process Monitor, I found out that it is pretty busy with accessing the .svn
directory. Here is what I did (and this somehow solved the problem):
- Kill Visual Studio
- Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
- Disable AnkhSvn as Source Control plugin (Tools->Options->Source Control->Plug-in Selection->None)
- Disable "Document Well 2010 Plus" (VS2010) or "Custom Document Well" (VS2012) in Productivity Power Tools (Tools->Options->Productivity Power Tools) - I read that somewhere and it might have helped as well...
- Close Visual Studio
- Delete the solution's
*.suo
file. This is located in the same folder as the solution itself. NOTE: You will lose several settings for your solution, like currently opened files, breakpoints, bookmarks, current solution configuration & platform (e.g. Debug x86) etc. - Restart Visual Studio
- Load the solution - it was much faster now!
- Close Visual Studio
- Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
- Re-enable AnkhSvn and the "Document Well"
- Restart Visual Studio
- Open the solution - it was still loaded in seconds!
I do not know which of these steps actually solved the problem. Probably, not all these steps are required, but I did not want to reproduce the problem to find out which steps may be omitted. :)