Breaking Visual Studio is too easy

My first real WPF app started out fine, but over time, I found that I could build it perhaps once, then I'd get an out of memory exception and have to restart the IDE, or sometimes even reboot. You can imagine what a pain this was. I did some research and found that this is quite a common issue for a lot of people. There are other issues, for example, someone I know tells me that for him the linker crashes with an internal error inside the "IncrBuildImage" function, every second build. He's building native code. I don't know the answer to his issue, but I know how I solved mine.

The issue is that the compiler often can't deal with a WPF app that has a lot of resources in it ( my exe was 32 MB which included a lot of UI elements as PNGs ). There's two solutions here:

1 - make your UI elements XAML. This just makes sense, they take up less space, and scale to any size. Expression Design is actually awesome at taking Adobe Illustrator and other formats and turning them in to XAML. This is the approach I am taking going forward

2 - put all your resources in a dll. If you're showing big images, as I invariably am given the apps I write, then you may not want or be able to convert them to XAML. So, put them in a dll, which you never change, and therefore do not have to build more than once.

I would prefer not to have my images in a resource dll, but it's made me a lot more productive. If they fix this bug in VS2010, I may go back to how it was, but certainly this works, and it is an effective workaround for yet another Visual Studio bug.

I am actually travelling to the US for a couple of weeks starting tomorrow, so my post frequency may slow down, although I do have at least 10 other .NET issues bookmarked to write about, so with some luck I may manage to keep up my current post frequency of a couple every now and then. Doesn't sound too challenging, but if this post is two weeks old and it's on top, that's my excuse, and I'll be posting again for sure when I get back.