Bizarre message from Visual Studio

Gary Wheeler

One of my problem children was adding an existing source file to a project in Visual Studio 2008, and received the following message: Cannot access data for the desired filter since it is in a zombie state I resisted the urge to pull a George Romero and put a bullet in his brain. After we retried the 'add' operation, it appeared to work. MSDN doesn't have anything to say about the message, and Google only nets three instances. Does anybody know what this means/meant?

Software Zen: delete this;

muzzdeni

the message is not clear bin saying if the data or filter is in a zombie state. two things come to mind, a thread in visual studio failed for some reason, or the os could not provide the correct file stats to visual studio.

RobCroll

try searching on "zombie state visual studio" there have been issues since 2006. It has to do with plugins.

"You get that on the big jobs."

Gary Wheeler

Thanks Rob. I don't know which is more annoying: the original cryptically-unfunny(*) error message, the lack of information on it in the MSDN, or the fact that it's a known bug that still isn't fixed even in VS2010. (*) I f***ing hate cute error messages. Tell me in plain and simple terms what went wrong, and suggest what I need to do to fix it. This is basic, essential design, even in a tool intended for a sophisticated audience like developers.

Software Zen: delete this;