Installing Windows SDK breaks F# Visual Studio integration

Beware! If you install the Windows SDK – perhaps to get access to the interesting looking WPF performance tools – you’ll find that it hoses your F# Visual Studio integration. I found that it causes intellisense tooltips to stop appearing, and the integrated F# interactive to crash Visual Studio. Both of these issues are a real pain; especially the inability to see the inferred types “live”, which is pretty much essential for F# development – where the focus is on compile time correctness.

I remembered seeing a post on that Windows SDK blog that I’d come across relating to a similar issue with the XAML editor (I’ve been doing some work with WPF recently, more on that in a later post) so thought I’d try the steps they recommend, in short, re-registering TextMgrP.dll:

regsvr32 "%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv\TextMgrP.dll"

…and all my problems went away. Hope you find this useful.

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  • L. Fregimus

    Thank you so much, you saved my day! I installed the SDK on top of VS2008 SP1, and my F# intellisense and background compilation indeed got immediately broken. Your solution worked for me.

  • http://www.voyce.com voyce

    Glad to be of assistance!

  • Vamper Attila

    Thank a lot for you ! :) .. but i don’t understand why this happened .. again THX !

  • http://www.sharpthoughts.net mr. Heyrman

    This resolved the issue for me as well, happy to get my F# environment back.

    One remark though, if you are running a 64-BIT OS like I do, the command in the suggested solution might need to be tweaked to

    regsvr32 “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv\TextMgrP.dll”

    Because VS is 32 bit while %commonprogramfiles% refers to the standard ‘program files’ directory.

  • http://www.voyce.com voyce

    Thanks the info. I haven’t yet moved to a 64-bit version of the OS, unfortunately.

    Ian

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