VS2008 partially freezing when switching to HTML design view

This is an odd freeze. When I switch from source view to design view for an HTML or ASPX file, the client area freezes, but I can still click on other tabs a开发者_StackOverflownd menus.

What am I missing here? Really don't feel like reinstalling VS2008.

I had the same problem, and found one resolution.

In VS 2008, In a page that was using a master page, the either frequency while working in source view or switching to design view, IDE would freeze for 10-20 seconds.

In my master template, I had references to the Google hosted JQuery, Jquery UI, and one or two more scripts off site. These were placed directly in my master page's head section.

I downloaded the js and then by deleting any offsite references, my IDE would be smooth again in both design and source mode.

I also discovered I could put the scripts inside my ToolkitScriptManager (I'm using AjaxControlToolkit) and added the Mode="Release", and could place the http://www.google.com references for the scripts. The IDE is still working fine for me.

This is often due to the Design mode downloading external resources that are timing out. As @JonK mentioned, for him it was jQuery references. I have seen this when the ConnectionString was set to production databases that could not be accessed on my development machine, even though I wasn't debugging (running) the site only editing code, it would still try to connect and because it couldn't it would stall waiting for the timeout.

VS2008 is mostly single-threaded for UI operations like this, so if it is downloading a slow or non-existent network path it hangs like this.

VS2008 can make all kinds of network requests, so these two examples may not solve it for you. The best way I have found to diagnose the problem is to use the Microsoft tool Process Monitor, filter by the Process webdev.exe, and watch for I/O requests that are long running and/or throwing errors. In my case, I could find the place that was having a problem because there would be a 20 second gap in between the hundreds of I/O entries in Process Monitor. Then, just back-tracked from when that gap began and I eventually found the request that was causing the problem.

This may not be possible for you, but if you can, an upgrade to VS2010 would help; it does a much better job of running process on multiple threads in more places so you don't have to worry about this as much.

Have you tried restarting your computer and then reopening your project?