BizTalk Orchestration Designer Crashes Visual Studio

This is just a quick post to note in passing an issue that I encountered recently. In my current project I am again working as a BizTalk architect, and we are using BizTalk Server 2006 R2, and hence the designer is hosted in Visual Studio 2005. After taking over some enormous orchestrations from another member of the team recently I started to find that Visual Studio started crashing often and unpredictably. So much so, in fact, that I had to press ctrl+S after just about every shape change, as I was losing work so often.

Now, I had worked on a project a couple of years ago where we suffered this a lot. I think that one was BizTalk Server 2006 R1. After having done some stints with BizTalk 209 / VS 2008 it came as a nasty surprise to be getting this issue again.

As you might expect, I decided to search to see who else had had the same issue. I got a couple of relevant hits. This one, http://continuouslyintegrating.blogspot.com/2008/01/orchestration-designer-crashes-visual.html, was interesting as it implied that there was something in your profile that was causing the issue. I didn't really want to have to rebuild a profile in the middle of a critical phase in the project so I kept searching.

I then came across this one, http://www.sabratech.co.uk/blogs/yossidahan/labels/visual%20studio.html, and more things to try. The thing that seemed to be intuitively right was that the size of the orchestration might be an issue. I had only started experiencing issues once I started to work on huge orchestrations. Before that there had been no problem. When working on modest orchestrations there was no problem.

I therefore took the suggestion that had the least amount of pain, to decrease the colour depth in my display settings from 32-bit down to 16-bit. I was hoping that this was going to do the trick. I then started working on the offending orchestrations and I could at least get started, but I did experience further crashes.

I then thought of a further step I might take, and it seemed to follow on from reducing the graphics load. I zoomed out. Never had another crash after that!

I think part of the problem is that the orchestration designer renders the orchestration as an image, or rather as a series of overlapping images. Then, depending on where you scroll to, a certain portion of the image is displayed. Therefore, no matter how small your viewing area in the designer the orchestration designer is still rendering a pretty big image. However, if you scroll out you reduce the overall size f the image that needs to be rendered. And, as mentioned, if you decrease the colour depth you reduce the size of it still further.

Conclusion

Huge orchestrations, from a design point of view, are bad. Huge orchestrations, from the Visual Studio Orchestration Designer point of view, are bad. If you must have them (as in my case where I was handed them and had to make them work), reducing the graphics load on your machine is a quick way to prevent Visual Studio from crashing under the load.