The ORM Foundation

Using a slightly-modified version of the IT Management model (available on the ORM site), I added a Relational View.

This view is quite messy, so I am moving around the tables and renaming a few of the relationships to make table names shorter.

I find that after about 5 moves of tables, Visual Studio crashes. It has happened about five times. Doesn't seem to matter if I save my changes (except that I lose less work!).

This is clearly a bug in VS2010, but I wonder if you are doing something in the graphic modules that aggravates it?

- Jim

Hi Jim,

Is there any way you can get a call stack? I've been moving shapes around on this diagram for 5 minutes without a blip. This is by far the most standard DSL diagram we have. The only special thing we're doing is hiding the automatic expand/collapse buttons. If the exception dialog you see doesn't offer detail information, which will generally show you a callstack, then try the following:

1. Open a NORMA file in VS and get to the point right before you crash
2. Open another VS instance
3. Attach a debugger to the first instance of devenv.exe (.NET 4.0 for Visual Studio 2010)
4. In the Debugging tab in the Tools/Options dialog, turn off 'Enable Just my Code'
5. Open the Debug/Exceptions dialog and set the 'Common Language Runtime Exceptions' dialog to 'Break when Thrown'
6. Continue working

See if you can get something to throw an exception in any of the ORMSolutions dlls. Make sure that continuing from the exception creates your problem.

-Matt

Trying to get a call stack by following your instructions. (I'm not a programmer.)

Up through step #4 works fine. But I'm missing something in step #5, as the list of common language runtime exceptions goes on and on. 'Break when Thrown' must be buried in there, somewhere.

I turned on the break for all and got this message:

System.NullReferenceException occurred
  Message=Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
  Source=Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Sdk.Diagrams.10.0
  StackTrace:
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.AnchorPointAction.OnMouseActionCanceled(DiagramEventArgs e)
  InnerException:

System.NullReferenceException occurred
  Message=Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
  Source=Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Sdk.Diagrams.10.0
  StackTrace:
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.AnchorPointAction.OnMouseActionCanceled(DiagramEventArgs e)
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.MouseAction.InvokeStateChangeMethods(MouseActionState oldState, MouseActionState newState, DiagramClientView diagramClientView, ActionRequest nextAction)
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.MouseAction.FlushInternalEventQueue()
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.MouseAction.Cancel(DiagramClientView diagramClientView)
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.AnchorPointAction.OnMouseMove(DiagramMouseEventArgs e)
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.MouseAction.InvokeMouseActionEventMethods(MouseActionEvent mouseActionEvent, DiagramEventArgs diagramArgs)
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.MouseAction.FlushInternalEventQueue()
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.MouseAction.MouseMove(DiagramMouseEventArgs mouseArgs)
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.DiagramClientView.DispatchMouseMove(DiagramMouseEventArgs mouseArgs)
       at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams.DiagramClientView.OnMouseMove(MouseEventArgs e)
  InnerException:

Thanks Jim, that helped me track this.

In VS2010 only, if you hover over the connection point for a foreign key link you'll see a move cursor with a dot in the middle. If you click with this cursor visible to start a drag you'll crash when you let go of the mouse button.

We aren't really set up to handle moving connection points in this view (we have no way to persist them right now because apart from the shape positions the whole view is regenerated with the relational model) so I need to figure out what new VS2010 feature is on by default and turn it off.

In the meantime, make sure you don't put down the mouse button when the connection-point-moving cursor is visible. This dies in the window proc and results in a bad crash, as I'm sure you've noticed.

-Matt