ASP.NET MVC RC finally working for me

11 March, 2009. It was a Wednesday.

It’s been about 4 misfires, but I’ve finally upgraded my local machine to the RC2 of ASP.NET MVC. What was holding me back? Every time I opened a WebForms page (.aspx, .ascx, .master), Visual Studio would hard-crash on me. Open a WebForms file, VS would just disappear, gone. No error message except for an ever-so-informative entry in the Windows application log.

It turned out to be a CLR…bug? feature? Phil Haack posted about a fix for it:

http://haacked.com/archive/2009/03/06/hotfix-for-installing-aspnetmvc.aspx

Now, a couple of things you probably want to do:

Install the hotfixes for previous frameworks (thanks, Jeffrey)
Install the CORRECT VERSION of the .NET 3.5 SP1 hotfix

Pay attention to that last one, the download site doesn’t say what hotfix file goes for what operating systems. I’m on Server 2008 x64, which evidently means use the file with “Windows6.0” in the name, and the correct platform (x64, x86 etc.)

Me, I installed the wrong version, and the crashing continued. Make sure you restart your machine as well, whether it prompts you to do so or not. I confirmed this hotfix works for the following VS add-ins:

Gallio
ReSharper
TestDriven.NET

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