WeSam.Brain.Dump();: How to diagnose a freezing Visual Studio plug-in

What the hell are you doing Visual Studioooooooo!!!!!

Is a phrase I hear many times a week if not daily. If you are a .Net developer I am sure that you've been there.

As a developer, who write multithreaded apps, and made a blood pact to not create one that freezes, there is nothing worse than a continuous freezing -Visual Studio- development environment.

Well, I have good news and some more good news. Whether you are using Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010) or Visual Studio 2012 (VS2012), there is a way to hunt the cause and disable it. You will need:

NuGet: I am sure you already have it, if you don't. There is work around.
Component Diagnostics - another plug-in available through NuGet or at Visual Studio Gallery This plugin was developed by Paul Harrington. A great innovation, yet under exposed.

Diagnosing the problem

If you just started facing the problem out of the blue, and you have a decent computer specs. It's possible that some plug-in updated itself, and like every software. It's possible to have bugs, especially with today's rapid agile releases. Performance testing is rarely ever implemented, again especially with free plugins.

First, verify that its a plug-in. Use the DevEnv.exe /SafeMode argument

If your experience suddenly becomes better and no more freezing, then it's definitely a plug-in

Second, find the trouble making plug-in

So what is making your VS environment freeze? using the above mentioned plug-in

go to the new Component Diagnostics tool window ==> Package Manager Tab

scrolling down the list, I search for the plug in that took the most time to load. One stands out VSCommandPackage with it's 10K microseconds AutoLoad time.

10 seconds might not sound like a long time, but add to it to all the other packages Avg 0.5~2 second and it you start to feel it, everytime you open a solution. Possibly every time you open a file or even build.