Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 - code files corrupt randomly

Question

This has been happening to me and others on my team, maybe once a week. We'll be debugging a web application project and then edit and save a text file that is part of the site (like a .aspx or .css files). The file will initially be fine in visual studio and look normal, but the output to the browser will be garbage. It's hard to know what's going on until you close the file in visual studio and try to re-open it. Visual studio will open the file in notepad for some reason, and you'll see all garbage characters.

To fix the problem I have to revert the file from TFS and any work not in TFS is lost.

We have Resharper 8.2.1 and the latest Telerik UI for Asp.net Ajax controls installed. Everything else is pretty standard setup for Visual Studio.

The web application project is set to use IIS Express.

Does anyone else ever have this problem, and know what might be causing it?

Edit: This just happened again, but this time with a class library project. So it doesn't seem to be exclusively a problem with web application projects.

Answer 1

In my case the problem had to do with the encryption software that is installed on my Dell laptop - "CREDANT Mobile Guardian Shield". If you have administrative access to this, then you can add exceptions so that it doesn't encrypt your project / solutions folders.

I don't have access to modify the exception list, so what I did was look through the exception list and found a path listed that looked suitable for placing files I work with. In my case I chose "C:\sources\". I reinstalled all of my tooling into c:\sources\apps\, and use c:\sources\projects\ for all my solution files / TFS workspaces. My apps run faster now because there's no encryption overhead, and I haven't had the file corruption problem since doing this about 2 months ago.

Answer 2

Notepad is believing that the text file is Unicode but it is ANSI. Change the file encoding to Unicode.