Tag Archives: visual-studio

Don’t Hide the GitExtension VS Toolbar

Monday mornings are rough.  It’s always hard to drag yourself into work after a few days away.  But at least the sun was shining and the birds were singing.

Unfortunately my idealistic Monday morning was rudely interrupted by Visual Studio giving me this lovely dialog:

vscrash

“Ok, no problem”, I thought to myself.  “I’ll just restart Visual Studio”.  A few hiccups once in a while is not unusual.  However after my 4th restart attempt including a reboot in the middle and still getting the error I was getting worried.  Was I looking at a long day of repairing/reinstalling Visual Studio?

I figured I’d do a quick search online, though I couldn’t imagine I would find anything useful under “Visual Studio Crash Startup”.  I was wrong.

GitExtToolbar
The offending little scamp

I came across several mentions of GitExtensions causing problems.  Specifically the GitExtensions Toolbar within Visual Studio.  Apparently it REALLY doesn’t like being hidden.  Fortunately I had already had my coffee this Monday morning and the gears were turning in my head (had this happened just one hour earlier we may have had a very different outcome).  I remembered that on Friday I had done exactly this, I had hidden the GitExtensions Toolbar in Visual Studio.  I love Git and use it extensively for my personal and professional side projects.  But this VM I am running on is used only for my day job and we don’t use Git.  So I had figured I would clean up my environment a bit.  Little did I know the tripwire I had just hit.

Apparently this is a known issue in GitExtensions (has been fixed as of 2.48.04): https://github.com/gitextensions/gitextensions/issues/2587

There are a couple of ways to fix this issue:

1. Start Visual Studio in safe mode and unhide the toolbar.  You can do this by starting Visual Studio from the command line with the appropriate command line arguments:

DevEnv.exe /safemode

2. Use Control/Panel – Programs and Features to change your Git Extensions installation and remove the Visual Studio plugin (this is what I did).

GitExtVsAddon

3. Update to the latest version of Git Extensions.  This issue has been resolved.