Introduction
As part of assignment,
I was working on a project, which is having 137 projects Windows Form in a solution.
Whenever I was building my solution, I was getting Out-Of-Memory error and due
to this my Visual Studio use to get crash. Then the only solution left with me
was to restart my Visual Studio L. Earlier I as facing this issue once a while, but
from last week, it is occurring frequently. Hope you can imagine, how painful
it is restart the Visual Studio every now-and-then, especially when your
solution contains such a huge number of projects. My error was something like
this: “The "ResolveManifestFiles" task failed unexpectedly. System.OutOfMemoryException: Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program.”
The only thing, which was coming into my mind, was that it is due to Visual Studio’s memory limits. I also tried to minimize Visual Studio, but no luckL.
After consulting with few people, I got an idea to breakup my solution into multiple solutions. But again, it was not the best solution for me because my project was already on
the last stage (about to over) and it was not the correct time to take this much big risk. So, I dropped this suggestion also.
After hitting my head
for 4-5 days, I reached to some conclusion. One of the reasons was Heap fragmentation,
due to which, my Virtual Memory was keep raising and ultimately it was affecting
my GC. But this reason was also not 100% correct. Because Virtual Memory will rise,
only when I’ll run my application. But in my case, I was getting error during
build itself. So, again no luck L
While doing analysis
on the same, I thought, let’s open manifest file and check once. And luckily I
got the clue. On opening manifest file, I found that there are lot of hash
values which are nothing but my image files. In my project I was using approx
150 image files. According to my project requirement, we were not supposed to
deploy those image files. Then what those files were doing there, why they are
part of my manifest? Now a very BIG
question was, how those image files became part of my manifest?
This happened because
Visual Studio, by default sets image’s ‘Build Action’ property to ‘Content’. As
soon as I changed this property to ‘None’, my error goes off. This one small
property worked like a charm for me J
By setting ‘Build
Action’ property to ‘None’, I was able to reduce the size of manifest file to
approx 0.9GB.
I shared this as a tip, so that you need not to spend 5-6 days, to analyze the issue J
Points of Interest
Whenever you get out of memory error in visual studio, one possible reason can be due to huge manifest file. So, just try to play around it and you will get
some clue 
