Visual Studio 2008 – Garbled Text in XAML View

Since switching to Windows 7 on my work laptop I've had pretty constant issues with the XAML designer in Visual Studio 2008. Essentially, when I scroll through the XAML code the text becomes garbled and near impossible to read. Switching back and forth between views works, but is a dirty, frustrating and somewhat time-consuming solution. It is also one of those things that works fine on everyone else's computer (to be honest I'm still not sure why) and is difficult to find appropriate keywords for when searching online.

 

garbledtext


This morning I came across an issue logged on Microsoft's connect page (http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/465834/visual-studio-2008-xaml-editor-doesnt-paint-properly) with similar symptoms to my own. In the comments section Mark Wilson-Thomas (of the WPF and Silverlight team) suggested doubling the number of available GDI handles - which is defaulted to 10,000 on Windows 7.

So, I updated the following registry key DWORD value from 2710 hex (10,000 decimal) to 4e20 (20,000 decimal)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\GDIProcessHandleQuota

I then restarted VS2008 and, voila, no more garbled text. Happy days!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks for the tip -- had this problem when using Visual Studio 2008 and also 2010 when writing VB.NET or C# code. So far so good! Note: I usually have a lot of tabs opened in Firefox and I notice they use quite a few GDI objects and usually all my Windows for any apps go crazy, e.g., borders around opened windows go black, bit color drops from 32 bit to 16 bit, when I have over 50 tabs opened. Thanks so much for the post and solution!
May 24, 2011 at 9:59 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excel - Adding an existing Pivot table to the data model

Image
  I've been working more with, and continue to be amazed by, Power Pivot. I recently ran into an issue where I needed to add the data for an existing Power Pivot report to the Data Model. There is a checkbox that makes this easy when creating a PivotTable: As so often happens, the analysis grew in scope/importance and I found myself needing to add the data to the data model. While it's not obvious how, there is a way to add an existing Pivot table to the data model. There's a More Tables... link in the PivotTable Fields pane.  Clicking on the  More Tables... results in a dialog confirming that you want to Create a New PivotTable .  Doing so will result in the creation of the new PivotTable in a new sheet. By default the data is added to the data model. You'll likely lose some formatting but for anything other than a trivial PivotTable, this should save effort, as it did for me.
Read more

Getting Started with Mirth (Part 1)

Image
This is the first post in a 2 part series. The second post is here Recently I posted about my positive experience when using Mirth by Webreach as an open source communication layer between one of our in-house applications and a third party and proprietary web service interface. That post received a large amount of attention (relative to my other posts :o) ) so now I will post a quickstart guide to creating a similar setup. In this post I will go over the very basics of using Mirth (please dig in and play around with some more advanced options/configurations), specifically I will demonstrate how to use Mirth to read data from a database, package the data up in a SOAP envelope, send the data to a web service and process the SOAP response. I'll also show you how easy it is to monitor channels once deployed. Once you've installed and opened Mirth for the first time you'll be presented with an empty dashboard - but it wont stay empty for long. This is where you'll s...
Read more

Mirth

Image
Introduction Let's talk about Mirth. At it's simplest, Mirth  link is an Open Source HL7 interface engine. HL7 (Health Level 7) is an NPO involved in the development of healthcare standards and the HL7 v2.x and HL7 v3 standards are commonly used in Medical Information for data interchange - including but not limited to clinical, financial, logistical and administrative messaging. I first ran across Mirth over a year ago on a personal quest to find an alternative to our client's legacy HL7 application. Academically, I wrote a number of lexical analysis tools using lexx, yacc, bison and JavaCC and knew the challenges of writing and maintaining complex parsers. I was simply looking for something that could parse HL7 for us, and perhaps log messages and provide a little more transparency than our application currently allowed.  A year later and our legacy application is still going strong (read: my proposal was declined), but Mirth is being used in production, far away from th...
Read more