Office 2010 Beta causes Visual Studio 2008 ping-of-death

After installing Office 2010 Beta, I discovered that the ASPX editor in Visual Studio 2008 will hang. It doesn’t hang instantly but it does hang before you can get much done, usually after doing a copy/paste operation. Once the hang happens, clicking anywhere the Visual Studio window causes a “ping” sound and the window is frozen.

I had this issue despite completely uninstalling all Office 2007 products before installing Office 2010 Professional Plus Beta (as well as Visio 2010 and Project 2010).

Visual Studio 2008 uses a component that is shared with Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (formerly known as FrontPage) and Expression Web 2 for authoring web pages. The Office 2010 Beta installation appears to corrupt this component or replace it with one that is not backwards compatible with Visual Studio 2008.

Fortunately this issue is easy to fix. This component shows up in “Programs and Settings” as “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component”.

Righ-click and choose “Change” from the context menu. Choose the “Repair” option in the dialog that pops up.

This only takes a minute or so and should resolve the issue.

via Martin Hinselwood.