I have been using WebMatrix 3 and Visual Studio 2012 without trouble for a long time. Starting today, every time I open a WebMatrix 3 project in VS2012 and I launch it, VS2012 hangs and shows as "Not Responding" in the Task Manager. I
can launch the project from within WebMatrix 3 and it does open the web browser and can successfully run the site's code. But when I try to run the program in VS2012 it hangs and I have to use the Task Manager to close the VS2012 IDE.
I tried creating a new starter project and the same thing happens with it. Note, I am able to run and debug **non**-WebMatrix 3 projects just fine, including MVC Web Roles. I tried restarting my computer and that did not help.
I found this article on how a "blocked" file can cause this kind of behavior in strange places:
http://digioz.blogspot.com/2013/06/visual-studio-2012-freezes-or-crashes.html
But I don't know how to determine which file(s) may be blocked. Also, I'm wondering if it's a weird problem with IIS Express. Has anyone seen this and knows how to fix it?
UPDATE: I've noticed that it takes nearly 40 seconds to open WebMatrix 3 projects VS 2012 and it never took that long before. After seeing a status line saying "Open Access Controls registers" in the status line, there appears to be a 30 second
wait before project loading continues, a delay time curious close to the typical time-out setting for sockets.
Also, I tried switching from my default browser for IIS Express sessions from Chrome to Internet Explorer. The project ran find. **However**, the next time I ran it IE displayed the same "hanging" behavior as Chrome and after multiple
attempts, never came back (still hangs)
UPDATE 2: After a long wait, at least a minute, a breakpoint I set was hit. However, there was a message box overlaying the IDE saying:
"Loading symbols for Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.PageInspector.Tracing.dll from:
C:\WINDOWS\dll
Attempting to cancel will disable further symbol loading."
That directory does not exist on my hard disk. Could this be the problem?
If so, why is VS2012 having trouble finding DLLs only with WebMatrix 3 projects and not with others?
And of course, how can I fix this?
-- roschler