No Android devices listed and VisualStudio crashes when opening Nougat solution/project. HELP!

Elements Oxygene
1

Oxygene 6.1.53.1351
VS Shell 11.0.60610.1 Q11REL

If I open an Oxygene for Cocoa project it crashes Visual Studio. It appears to be an issue when communicating with CrossBox on the Mac host since if I terminate the Mac CrossBox server, the solution opens successfully but Visual Studio crashes the instant that I then restart CrossBox. Simply pausing it makes no difference - VS still crashes. I can only open Nougat projects if CrossBox is not running at all.

The crash is another of those oh-so-helpful “Visual Studio has stopped working” dialogs. The “Problem Details” in the “Check online for a solution / Restart” dialog are:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: CLR20r3
Problem Signature 01: devenv.exe
Problem Signature 02: 11.0.60610.1
Problem Signature 03: 51b52140
Problem Signature 04: Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.11.0
Problem Signature 05: 11.0.60315.1
Problem Signature 06: 514298c6
Problem Signature 07: 7
Problem Signature 08: 18
Problem Signature 09: System.ObjectDisposedException
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

I first experienced this when trying to get an Oxygene environment up and running in a Windows 8 VM. I couldn’t get CrossBox to recognise my Android devices in that VM so decided to get up and running with Nougat instead and ran straight into this crashing issue. Having had no similar problems with my previous Win 7 (64-bit) VM I suspected that Win 8 might be the problem.

Unfortunately I had at that point - rather rashly - already deleted that Win 7 VM so had to start over from a fresh VM from my “clean” Win 7 64-bit template (the same template that the previous VM originated from).

And now here I am having the exact same difficulties.

With Nougat - the crash.
With Cooper - the CrossBox drop-down resolutely refuses to recognise any attached physical devices or even to list my configured Android virtual devices.

The Crossbox drop-down icon is constantly showing the dark-grey/charcoal “disc with a diagonal bar”.

Additional info: In case there was some issue with a mismatch in CrossBox versions I have remoted my previous Crossbox server and reinstalled the version that was installed with the 6.1.53.1351 build. I also deleted everything from the Crossbox cache folder.

I have not yet tried the latest beta (or any other builds) but since I did not previously have this trouble using the 6.1.53.1351 build I don’t see that this would help not to mention I would need to clone the VM to create one in which to play with the beta and right now I am sick to the back teeth of watching VM clone progress bars and just want to get back to a point where I can actually do something, anything, with Oxygene.

HELP ?

2

Very odd. Can you check Event Viewer? Usually there are 2 or 3 entries for a VS crash, and one of them has a managed (.NET) call stack and exception message that will be more helpful.

3

Jolyon. Does creating new projects finish?

4

As for not seeing any Android devices: are you running in a VM or on a Windows host machine? if you are in a VM, can you double-check that the Android USB device is connected thru to the VM (in VMware Fusion, you can go to “Virtual Machine|USB and Bluetooth” in the menu, and connect USB devices to the VM)?

Also, do you have the device driver form your Android device installed? Most Android devices ill not be found on Windows, until the proper driver is installed. For my (first-generation) Nexus 7, for example, i had to go to the ASUS website and dig that driver up. This is not specific to Oxygene, the base Android SDK tools will not see your devices, without the driver (yes, after 5+ years with Mac and iOS, this felt like a step back into the 10th century for me, too :wink:

5

Also, to get a device list, open a command prompt in your android “platform-tools” folder. type ‘adb devices’ and it will give you a list of what it knows about.

6

Creating new projects:

For Android finishes OK (but still no devices to run on).

iOS project: crashes in a slightly different way/at a different time. It appears to create the solution but before it appears in the solution explorer I briefly see the “Install CrossBox” dialog before it is quickly replaced by the “Select a CrossBox Server and Device” dialog with the “Please select device” drop down.

At that point the entire Visual Studio UI does that “fade to a washed out” look and stops responding and shortly after that the exact same problem report and “Visual Studio has stopped responding”.

Android:

“adb devices” lists nothing either

I am running Oxygene in a Window 7, Parallels VM (ver 9) on a Mac. Android devices are attached to the VM USB bus directly (i.e. not passing thru the host. And yes, I have the device drivers installed.

Cocoa:

I have attached the event details from Event Viewer, including StackTrace which does involve ZeroConf/CrossBox for the .NET runtime error. Also I attached an immediately preceding error reported by the Bonjour Service

7

If ‘adb devices’ is empty, then something isn’t connected properly. I don’t have a parallels system set up, so I can’t be much use on how to get devices to show up in a VM.

As for cocoa, I’ll be looking at the event details and see if there’s anything meaningful.

8

Aagh, sorry for the false alarm guys.

Having just got back to my system this evening and restarted my VM, it informed me of a Windows Update (just the one). After that update I then got a notification that a USB device driver had failed to start/install. When I checked my devices it was the ASUS MTP driver, but the ADB Composite driver was also listed and marked as OK.

I re-tried “adb devices” and hey presto - my TF101 was listed.

So I started VS/Oxygene and tried opening the iOS solution… up popped the CrossBox authorisation dialog. All seems to be functioning normally !

I had been through a number of restart cycles as the templated VM updated itself and I thought it was up-to-date (it had been up for 1-2 hours at the point at which I gave up yesterday with nary a whisper of an update required). But apparently not, and whatever was in that last update seems to have fixed my problems!

Once again and with feeling: AAAAGH !!!

The only question now is whether my Windows 8 VM also just needs a similar last visit to the Windows update well …?

9

Me and my big mouth. Having switched to the Windows 8 VM (shutting down my Win 7 one first - just in case) and finding that things have not improved there, I then shut that one down and went back to Windows 7.

And I’m right back where I started.

adb devices listed nothing (yes I was sure to make sure that the device was attached to each VM as required) and opening/creating an iOS project crashes Visual Studio.

After another restart of the Win7 VM, my adb devices list once again identified an attached ASUS TF101 but the crossbox list in VisualStudio did not - the drop-down in a Cooper project (new or existing) contains only the VDM and SDK Manager tools.

(I also have two virtual devices defined which as you can see in the attached screen shot are also not listed)

One clarification - the Bonjour error that I originally mentioned does not occur BEFORE the crash, but is a consequence of it. What I saw in my event log as a Bonjour error occurring before the crash was in fact the Bonjour error that occured after the previous crash.

10

FWIW, in my experience, every VS crash also logs a separate Bonjour error to the Event Log. I’m not 100% sure why that happens, but i guess its just because VS (for CrossBox) connects to Bonjour, of course, and does not detach properly when it crashes. So that part can be safely ignored.

as for “adb devices”, i want to state just for the record that of “adb devices” does not list anything, the problem is in the Android tool stack or on the driver/hardware level, and outside of the scope of Oxygene — you’d fail to be able to work with devices from, say, Eclipse, just as well. If “adb devices” does list the device, but it does not show in VS, that does seem to be an Oxygene issue — but i’m wondering if maybe the problem is ‘just’ that the device connection is flaky — ie, maybe “adb devices” did first not list the device, then it did list it, and maybe when we queried it from VS it again did not list it (for whatever reason), opposed to something unrelated also being broken in VS/Oxygene.

IOW, it’d be good it have “adb devices” show your device consistently and reliably every time, before looking into what, if anything, could be wrong on VS/Oxygene side.

It seems really weird that “adb devices” not listing the device seems to be linked to iOS projects crashing on load (at least by correlation, but i can’t see the causation ;).

I’m hoping the callstack will help Brian narrow the crash down when he comes in, today.

—marc

11

Good news!

Parallels 9 is amazing, isn’t it. Maybe it’s just me but I have the impression that Parallels 9 really does provide the speedup promised. On my Core i5 book the upgrade was a vital one but works very satisfactory for a few days now.

12

Yep, I understand the relevance of “adb devices”.

I need to double-check but I think that the problem with USB detection occurs when I resume a suspended VM (this never used to be a problem so I’m still not sure why that would be and this may be something to do with Parallels 9 vs the previous version). But in any event, so far now when I start my Win 7 VM from “cold”, the USB all works fine - adb devices reliably and consistently reports my attached device.

But even when adb devices is reliable and consistent, Oxygene still fails to identify and list my device. Oxygene also fails in all cases to list my defined virtual devices which I am sure I used to see and which can’t be related to any USB issues.

If there is a problem with my Android tool stack, whatever that problem is seems to affecting the bit between Oxygene and Android. Are there any assumptions made by Oxygene w.r.t android sdk locations etc for example ? (I installed to c:\android-sdk rather than the default)

What is curious is that Oxygene seems to be aware that I have multiple virtual devices (two to be precise) since if I try to start an Android app it tells me I must first choose a device, where-as if I have only one virtual device defined it launches straight into that one without prompting.

In other news: Cocoa situation remains the same. :frowning:

@michaelthuma: Yep, the difference in performance is indeed remarkable, and it’s not as if Parallels 8 was a slouch to start with !! :slight_smile:

But I was beginning to wonder if the problems were something to do with version 9 (which I upgraded to at the same time as embarking on this exercise with that Windows 8 VM)

Do I take it that you are using Parallels 9 successfully with Oxygene (Android and Cocoa) without the issues I am experiencing ? If so, that would seem to rule that out.

Update: Pursuing the “could it be Parallels ?” thought I have now found a Parallels KB article which addresses potential problems with USB device recognition. However, this would not seem to address the Cocoa problems or explain why AVD devices are not listed (or physical devices when USB is functioning, according to adb).

13

Another piece of info that may or may not be useful:

I have another Windows 7 VM (on a similar Mac at the office) where Oxygene is behaving “normally”. I do not have any physical devices attached to this machine (it isn’t used for Oxygene work, it was installed for me to play with in moments of “downtime”).

But it does list AVD’s in Cooper projects and doesn’t crash when opening/creating Nougat projects.

VS Shell, Oxygene, Everwood and .NET framework versions are all the same as on the problem VM. Both VM’s have identical Parallels configurations.

When I start Visual Studio on the office machine, with no project or solution loaded the initial state of the Crossbox toolbar item has the charcoal “no entry” symbol and “Crossbox: N/A” as the text.

On the problem machine at the same point under the same conditions, the Crossbox icon is a green tick and the text read simply “Crossbox”.

Would this suggest at least some difference in the initial state of Crossbox that might point toward a clue as to what is going on ?

14

Hmm. so on fresh VS load, without opening a project, the CrossBox menu shows the green tick? That’s definitely wrong, and might help us narrow down what is different. That should not happen.

DO you have CrossBox Servers registered on both machines? What do you see in the menu on the “green” machine, when you open it up (without a project)?

15

I just re-checked and yes, from a completely “cold boot” of the VM, fresh VS start with no loaded project or solution I have a green tick “Crossbox”.

The Crossbox drop-down contains only the single entry “Register Server”, which is disabled.

I have not had to explicitly register servers on either machine - Bonjour has taken care of that for me (and obviously is installed in both VM’s - the same version of Bonjour in each case).

To see what would happen if I did register, I went to Projects and Solutions > Oxygene > Crossbox in the Visual Studio options dialog and explicitly registered the host machine. The authorisation dialog was initiated and as soon as I had entered the authorisation code into Visual Studio and pressed OK… VS crashed (event log entry attached in a new comment, as it is slightly different from that resulting from a ZeroConf service discovery event I think).

Incidentally, the first thing I did this evening when I got home was try un-installing and re-installing Oxygene (shutting down and re-starting the VM in between) but this made no difference.

16

Event entry resulting from explicitly registering the Crossbox server on the host.

17

Just to rule out a download issue, can you try downloading a fresh copy of Oxygene? I don’t think that’d be the problem, but i guess it’s always a possibility.

I’m working on something that may address the problem - I’ll have a build for you sometime later today.

18

I did not shift my development environment yet. Sorry, cannot assist at the moment. I would love to. I wanted to decide for Parallels 8, because I know it works, but in the meantime V9 shipped so I am still in the trial. I had to migrate my desktop computer to a working backup box for business first. After having realized that Parallels 9 makes a difference and that came into my mind when Marc talked about using Apple products at the beginning of this thread. I did not experience such a smooth migration of my computers ever before.

Primoz mentioned something about specific drivers …


That’s just a wild guess.

I will have to reread the thread, as this problem sounds familiar. Reminds me of a thread in the Beta short before the ‘Gamma’ was released, I think. Marc investigated the problem and using one of the latest builds before the official 6.0 launch everything worked fine. Maybe I can find a certain similarity.

19

Jolyon: RemObjects Oxygene - 6.1.54.1358.exe is going up to your Personal Downloads folder.

To be clear, as far as i understand from Brian, this includes code to catch the exception that seems to be causing your crash, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem (which both us and MS are pretty stumped about)

20

Actually, this is a prospective fix for the problem. We were holding an instance of something that we probably shouldn’t have. Hopefully it’s the right object.