Visual Studio hangs constantly during build

Question

Probably between 25 and 50% of the times I build my solution, I see this:

\"The operation you requested is taking longer than expected to complete. This dialog will clos

Answer 1

There was a suggestion on Microsoft Connect that Modelling project was responsible for the freezes. I removed a Modelling project from our solution and have experienced no freeze since then (about a week).

Answer 2

VS2019 exhibits this issue as well for me, in my case, the problem was because of dependencies stored on a network share. I have a hunch that Windows Defender Antivirus was scanning a lot of extra stuff that was in the network share, which is only accessible when connected to a fairly slow VPN.

Answer 3

Visual Studio 2017

Removing Anaconda3 from the installation fixed it. In procmon I saw hundreds of thousands of calls looking for files in the Anaconda3 folder from hundreds of instances of powershell spawned by msbuild.

Answer 4

I moved my VS 2008 development platform from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and encountered a situation where Visual Studio would hang up every time I tried to build a large project. I had to build the project, then use the Task Manager to kill VS and then restart. Needless to say, this made debugging really difficult! Anyhow, the problem was that in moving to Win 10, VS was no longer running as administrator (and perhaps Win 10 is more particular about privileges). Changing the properties so that the program ran as administrator resolved the problem. (IngoB -- I don't have enough status to comment on your post, but thanks for pointing this out!)

Answer 5

In my case setting "maximum number of parallel project builds" to 1 kinda helped (i.e. building a project from clean state causes 1 min freeze followed by normal build and every subsequent build works fine).

Aforementioned setting can be set in Tool -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run.

Answer 6

For me it was something to do with npm package install that ran automatically. I went to Tools > Options > Project and Solutions > External Web Tools and unchecked all external tools and restarted VS. After that, I was able to build it again. I know I need them to be checked but I need to figure out what's triggering them and what's wrong with this solution file.