I’m at it again. Yesterday when working on a simplistic WPF form for a user profile configuration scenario, Visual Studio did it again with a bang, crashing in all it’s glory when switching to designer view.

What solved the problem? Well… Erasing the solution .suo file so that the IDE doesn’t crash on startup if, by any chance, a xaml document is open in design view, and installing the following hotfix made available by Microsoft:

 

KB963035 - VS2008 SP1 sometimes hangs irretrievably after WPF Designer

 

This hotfix relates to the Visual Studio IDE hanging, not crashing. But nevertheless It can be a valuable contribution to solving the problem.

 

Cleaning the solution also solved the problem in some cases, from what I’ve read and heard.