Why Did Garmin Express cause Visual Studio and JustCode to Just Stop Working?

Last week, JustCode just stopped working.  Not only would JustCode not work, I couldn’t close Visual Studio without using Task Manager to kill the process.

I did the obvious things, starting with a reboot. No joy.  I went through the list of what changes I had made on my laptop in the past week, and the only thing that came to mind was Visual Studio Update 3.  So of course, I uninstalled the update and reverted to Update 2.  Still no joy.

Finally, I reached out to the team, and Ivan immediately came back with “Are you running Garmin Express?”.  Wait, what?!  As a matter of fact, I had just installed Garmin Express.  What does that have to do with Visual Studio and JustCode?

Turns out, there’s a common thread between the two, and it’s WCF.  There’s an issue with WCF that if your end points aren’t namespaced correctly (and evidently Garmin didn’t namespace their end points correctly – see this post on Stack Overflow), it will break other applications that use WCF. 

There are two solutions to the problem – you can run Visual Studio as administrator, or you can uninstall Garmin Express.  I chose the latter.  I use Visual Studio everyday, and I only update my Garmin maps once a quarter.

Summary

In addition to removing the Garmin software from my system, I learned another valuable lesson.  Use the Telerik support forums!  I literally banged my head against my desk for much longer than I should have!  This forum post specifically calls out the Garmin software.  What should have been a hiccup turned out to be a lost day of work. Next time, I’m hitting the forums FIRST when I have an issue.

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