Who causes the failure of mt.exe during linking stage of Visual Studio 2010

 

Recently, I am working on migrating our products to Visual Studio 2010 from VS2008, involving both c++/c# and extensive interops, and found much more chances of linking failure, due to mt.exe failing to access the target exe.

We know that some guys think most of the cases are caused by anti-virus products, and when using VS2008, I also got a few failures, and some of them was caused by devenv.exe, instead of anti-virus, after analyzing the logs. Since not happening too often, I did not dig into that. Recently, too many times I have experiences, so, I tried to investigate it.

My investigation shows that the culprit is Resharper. When troubleshooting with procmon, it shows that before mt.exe fails to open the target, devenv.exe just owns it, and the callstack shows the Resharper is causing troubles, and the opening operation takes more than 2second. I doubt that previously VS2008 is also caused by Resharper. Just because it rarely happens, I did not investigate it further.

To disable Resharper, choose Tool-Option-Resharper-Suspend. After disabling it, the chances have been greatly reduced.

The callstack for my case is as below for your reference:

   1: Method instance: (BEGIN=0250fc90)(MD=06001353)[JetBrains.Util.CollectionUtil.ForEach[[System.__Canon, mscorlib]](System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1, System.Action`1)]

   2: Method instance: (BEGIN=29bc5910)(MD=06001838)[JetBrains.ReSharper.Psi.Impl.Caches2.CacheUpdater.ExecuteMultiCore[[System.__Canon, mscorlib]](System.Collections.Generic.ICollection`1, System.String, System.Action`1)]

   3: Method instance: (BEGIN=29bc54c0)(MD=06001837)[JetBrains.ReSharper.Psi.Impl.Caches2.CacheUpdater.ExecuteMulticoreWithInterrupt[[System.__Canon, mscorlib]](System.Collections.Generic.ICollection`1, System.String, System.Action`1)]

   4: Method instance: (BEGIN=29bc4fd0)(MD=06001853)[JetBrains.ReSharper.Psi.Impl.Caches2.CacheUpdater+AddAssembliesJob.Do(JetBrains.Application.Progress.IProgressIndicator)]

   5: Method instance: (BEGIN=29bc3130)(MD=06001932)[JetBrains.ReSharper.Psi.Impl.Caches2.CacheUpdateThread.Run_ExecJob(JetBrains.ReSharper.Psi.Caches.Job, JetBrains.ReSharper.Psi.Impl.Caches2.CacheWorkItemSubprogress)]

   6: Method instance: (BEGIN=1a2b3480)(MD=06001931)[JetBrains.ReSharper.Psi.Impl.Caches2.CacheUpdateThread.Run()]

   7: Method instance: (BEGIN=1120f350)(MD=06000aeb)[JetBrains.Util.Logger.Catch(System.Action)]

   8: Method instance: (BEGIN=1a2b33d0)(MD=06001935)[JetBrains.ReSharper.Psi.Impl.Caches2.CacheUpdateThread.b__1()]