The Visual Studio goes away

Sometimes I wonder if I have a natural gift for finding bugs in visual studio, or just bad luck. I’ll be typing along and then… no visual studio. Today I found my fifth type of magic phrase to make visual studio go away. Paste this anywhere inside visual basic code in the visual studio 2012 release candidate:

    Class C(Of T)
        Shared Widening Operator CType(value As T) As C(Of T)
            Return Nothing
        End Operator
        Async Function Wrap(Of T)(task As System.Threading.Tasks.Task(Of T)) 
                        As System.Threading.Tasks.Task(Of C(Of T))
            Return await task
        End Function
    End Class

Since VB is continuously compiling in the background the bug triggers almost immediately, instead of later when you manually build the project. It appears that the implementation of ‘async’ in VB doesn’t like some types of implicit casts.

Hopefully Microsoft will fix this bug (I submitted it to Connect), as well as the other instabilities in the VS2012 RC, before the full release.

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