“Split view” is one of the new features in Visual Studio 2008 web designer: this is the possibility to have Design View and Source View of your page at the same time (see What’s New in ASP.NET and Web Development, “Visual Web Developer Enhancements” paragraph). A few days ago a customer called in to report a problem with his Visual Studio and split view: when trying to view a file (even a new one) in split view or design view the IDE either crashed or frozen.
As you can imagine we took a crash dump with adplus, but a first look at the threads, stack, exceptions etc… (the usual stuff) did not show anything interesting. Then I thought to some external process (like an antivirus, third parties add-ons etc…) that might meddle in and had a look at the list of modules loaded within the process with lmf (list loaded modules with full path). There where only a couple of odd dlls loaded, from Office 2003:
33f20000 34118000 FPCUTL (deferred)
Image path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\FPCUTL.DLL
Image name: FPCUTL.DLL
Timestamp: Wed Jun 06 19:44:55 2007 (4666F297)
CheckSum: 001EC356
ImageSize: 001F8000
File version: 11.0.8170.0
Product version: 11.0.8170.0
File flags: 0 (Mask 3F)
File OS: 40004 NT Win32
File type: 2.0 Dll
File date: 00000000.00000000
Translations: 0409.04e4
CompanyName: Microsoft Corporation
ProductName: Microsoft Office 2003
InternalName: FP40CUTL
OriginalFilename: FP40CUTL.DLL
ProductVersion: 11.0.8170
FileVersion: 11.0.8170
FileDescription: Microsoft Office FrontPage Client Utility Library
LegalCopyright: Copyright © 1995-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
37050000 37157000 OMFC (deferred)
Image path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OMFC.DLL
Image name: OMFC.DLL
Timestamp: Fri Apr 13 21:43:21 2007 (461FDD59)
CheckSum: 0010A869
ImageSize: 00107000
File version: 11.0.8164.0
Product version: 11.0.8164.0
File flags: 0 (Mask 3F)
File OS: 40004 NT Win32
File type: 2.0 Dll
File date: 00000000.00000000
Translations: 0000.04e4
CompanyName: Microsoft Corporation
ProductName: Microsoft Office 2003
InternalName: OMFC.DLL
OriginalFilename: OMFC.DLL
ProductVersion: 11.0.8164
FileVersion: 11.0.8164
FileDescription: Microsoft Office MFC
LegalCopyright: Copyright © 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
That rang a bell, especially about fpcutl.dll… This dll comes with both Visual Studio and Office 2003 but the two versions are incompatible: Visual Studio in this case was loading the wrong one. Why?
Well, it happens that Visual Studio looks at the system PATH to load this (and other) component, while Office doesn’t… Here is the PATH value from the dump (use !procinfo and then check the path value):
C:\WINDOWS\system32; C:\WINDOWS; C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem; C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\binn\; C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\; C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\; C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\; C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\OFFICE11
The Office 11 entry is the last one… but there is something wrong anyway, who spots it? ?
We have an entry for Visual Studio 8 (Visual Studio 2005), but where is the entry for Visual Studio 9 (VS 2008)? ?
For some reason the PATH value has not been updated (or maybe it has modified after the setup) and we don’t know exactly why; the point is that we need to fix it. A quick search on the machine found three copies of fpcutl.dll:
We added the missing folders at the beginning of the PATH string which now reads as:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Web Designer Tools\VWD;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\BIN;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools;
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5;
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\VCPackages;
C:\WINDOWS\system32;
C:\WINDOWS;
C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\binn\;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\;
C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\OFFICE11
The most important one on this case is “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Web Designer Tools\VWD”: Visual Studio will look into this folder to load the right version of fpcutl.dll (PATH is a first in – first serve list of folders, the first match will be the one we use) and Office continues working happily anyway. ?
Carlo
Quote of the day:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke