Michael Paladino

FIX: Visual Studio PowerCommands 2008 Crashes Visual Studio 2008 SP1

This post is mainly as a reminder to myself of how to fix this issue in case it ever comes up again.  I've had to do it on other computers before, but just started experiencing it on a different machine again today.

For me, when trying to add items to the toolbox in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Visual Studio would crash and just disappear with no error message.  The event log displayed a message of ".NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (72BD5E00) (80131506)".

The problem ended up being related to PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 which I've blogged about before and really like.  The solution is well documented in a forum post by Nick McCready at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/e2434065-9921-4861-b914-9cc9d6c55553/?ffpr=0.  I'll just quote directly from that entry:

Through Microsoft's help they came up with a work around which is a simple modification to the devenv.exe.config file.

This will exist in (64 bit systems) C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE

Or (32 bit systems) C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE

Add this XML token to the dependentAseembly list. They had me add it after the office one, but im not sure if that matters.

            <dependentAssembly>
                <assemblyIdentity name="office" publicKeyToken="71e9bce111e9429c" culture="neutral"/>
                <codeBase version="12.0.0.0" href="PrivateAssemblies\Office12\Office.dll"/>
            </dependentAssembly>

<!-NEW STUFF-->
            <dependentAssembly>
                <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.PowerCommands" publicKeyToken="null" culture="neutral"/>
                <codeBase version="1.1.0.0" href="C:\Program Files (x86)\PowerCommands\Microsoft.PowerCommands.dll"/>
            </dependentAssembly>

I hope that solution works for anyone else that might be having the same problem.  Thanks to Nick for the solution.

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008

If you're running Visual Studio 2008, I would highly recommend PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008.

From their page on MSDN Code Gallery:

PowerCommands is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2008 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE.

Basically, it adds a number of menu items to the right-click menu in various areas of Visual Studio. My favorites are "Open Command Prompt", "Open Containing Folder", and the ability to modify recent files and properties. Head over to the MSDN Code Gallery page for full details.