Tag: software

Visual Studio 2013 hangs after each debug session

Stumbled upon this issue when Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 would hang after each debug session. Very annoying especially when you want to quickly run the application test something, fix code and back to the beginning of this cycle. The hanging would occur for about 15-30s every time I would close the application and debug session ends. To resolve this I tried a lot of solutions suggested by Google which didn’t help:

  • Resetting Visual Studio 2013 settings via “devenv.exe /ResetSettings”
  • Deleted *.suo file
  • Rebuilt new solution file with all projects
  • Even disabled internet as I was suspecting some sort of network communication issue was causing this
  • Attempted to disable git integration with Visual Studio by renaming .git folder to _git as a temporary solution
  • Tried to disable IntelliSense with no luck

The only solution that worked for me was to disable Visual Studio host process for the project. To do this on the Project menu, click Properties, then click the Debug tab and uncheck the Enable the Visual Studio hosting process check box.

Hope this post saves a few hours messing around with settings for somebody trying to resolve this issue.

Getting rid of AVG safe search in Firefox address bar

Free does not usually mean that it comes without annoyances – a lesson learned from free AVG antivirus.  Apparently it likes to hijack my browser without my consent. Here are the steps to get rid of that pesky AVG safe search for Mozilla’s Firefox address bar:

  1. Type in the address-bar about:config and press Enter
  2. Confirm warning dialog
  3. Type in keyword.url in the filter
  4. Change value of keyword.url to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q= by right clicking on it and selecting “Modify” from the popup menu

Forwarding USB devices on Oracle VirtualBox

I had some painful experiences while trying to set up USB device forwarding to a virtual machine for Oracle VirtualBox so decided to share how I managed to make it work.

My setup is:

  • Windows 7 64bit host
  • Windows XP x86 guest
  • Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0.4

And here are the steps needed to set up USB device forwarding:

  1. Make sure that the guest virtual machine is turned off.
  2. Download Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack if you don’t have it already installed. Install it by simply double clicking on the file.
  3. Restart VirtualBox application just in case.
  4. Select the virtual machine, click Settings button, open USB page and select “Enable USB Controller” together with “Enable USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller”.

  5. Add USB device by clicking the button highlighted below.
  6. Once the device is added, select it and click on the edit button (one button below the add button). Make sure that Remote is set to Yes.
  7. Start guest virtual machine
  8. When it has started, go to Devices -> USB Devices and select the device you want to be available for the VM

Your device should now be available to the guest virtual machine.