You’ve been Deadlocked

If you’ve been using VS.NET 2005 for a while chances are that your debugging session could have been spectacularly crashing just when you thought you were so close finding that elusive critical bug. This situation may have manifested with the following exception:

ContextSwitchDeadlock was detected
Message: The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context <some nasty hex number> to COM context <another nasty hex number> for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations.

Usually, you can’t recover from this exception and the only way to be able to debug again is to restart the debugger (that is until it crashes again). The bad news is that this is a bug with the ContextSwitchDeadlock managed debugging assistant which the VS.NET team couldn’t fix in time. The good news is that you can prevent this MDA from raising his ugly head by ever again by just going to the Exceptions dialog (doesn’t appear by default in the Debug menu but you could add it by customizing the Debug menu) and disable the ContextSwitchDeadlock MDA found under the Managed Debugging Assistants category.