Visual Studio 2012

Where do I begin when your aging development environment starts to…. well… eat itself. 

To be completely transparent, I’m not a big fan of using old dev environments to try to get production ready code up and running. Normally it’s not an issue, really. But, when one has folks mucking about with the domain and changing things that affect one’s working environment, there’s where the trouble starts.

My VS 2012 environment started to act up last week, and at some point I simply had to terminate VS. Ya, not the best way to go about matters, but what can one do? The trouble started not in killing the VS process, rather trying to get it to run again. As I started up a new VS 2012 in Admin mode and “BlamO” a non-responsive process. The damn thing just would not start up. CRAP! After switching into “SafeMode”, I find that my old domain profile file locations had been removed from the Domain (you know that “Documents” folder location “App Data” where hidden things related to VS lives?) Wonderful, now what?! 

One might ask, well why not move on to VS 2015 or better yet VS 2017 (I really like 2017!). Well one has to understand our production level systems. In a word, or two – they are OLD! I have to use VS 2012 to create SSIS projects for our SQL 2012 servers. While one can certainly develop SSIS packages for SQL 2012 using VS 2015, one cannot create the Initial package using anything but VS 2012 (yeap, one of perpetual jokes about how some teams at MS don’t cross pollinate should be inserted at this point- I’m think the SQL team and the VS team should talk more).

Anyway, believing that there is solution- an odd fact about Moi- one finds these parameters for VS 2012 

• /ResetUserData – (AFAICT) Removes all user settings and makes you set them again. This will get you the initial prompt for settings again, clear your recent project history, etc.
• /ResetSettings – Restores the IDE’s default settings, optionally resets to the specified VSSettings file.
• /ResetSkipPkgs – Clears all SkipLoading tags added to VSPackages.
• /ResetAddin – Removes commands and command UI associated with the specified Add-in

The important one here is /ResetUserData  – Since I already know something is screwed up with my domain profile (as revealed via safemode), this is where we start. Upon executing DEVENV.exe /ResetUserData VS starts and gives me all kinds to popups about component this missing and error loading that- and I’m thinking ‘oh joy this thing is really mucked now’.

Patience….. after the dust settles… VS 2012 pops up into life, granted it’s missing some things on the start screen…. but it’s running! I quickly go into some settings to make sure I don’t run into some domain related problems.  And now I’m back at the OLD 2012 dev environment. 

Did I mention that I’m not really a big fan of using Old dev environments?  🙄 

The last part on this fixing my broken VS 2012 was to do a repair- turns out there was also some corruption of some the basic VS components… which is odd based on the fact that VS 2012 was still functional mostly. I suspect there where some installed extensions that may have been at the root of the problems. This part only took about an hour.

~ScottGeek