Visual Studio 2008: Why Doesn't my Language Service Add-In Work? ("Sorry, parsing could not recover")

Question

I'm trying to create my own language service in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but when I run the program (which starts the Visual Studio Experimental Hive) and try to open a source file, I get this error:

Any ideas how to fix it? (I already tried uninstalling and reinstalling VS, it didn't work. :( )

---

Update

It turns out this was due to a poor uninstallation of Spec#. I cleaned it up, but now the issue is that my language service doesn't actually highlight anything... I imagined this to be the cause, but seeing as how I still get the error and how it was irrelevant, I don't know what the problem is.

I'm using the default lexer/parser files with the default tokens, so I'd imagine there would be some sort of highlighting for my file types, but there isn't... any thoughts?

Answer 1

Never mind, it seems like it's working correctly:

if (x == 0)
{
}

is not even correct C code in the first place!

I was looking for syntax highlighting but I needed to set it up first, and it seems like it's working now.

Answer 2

Here are the steps you need to take to get rid of this error:

• Uninstall Visual Studio 2008
• Uninstall all pre-release / beta software from your machine
• Use the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool
• Re-install Visual Studio 2008
• Re-install Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Use devenv.exe /resetskippkgs from the command prompt while logged in as an admin user, before first starting Visual Studio 2008 SP1 after the re-installation.

The Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool will help getting rid of pre-release versions of the SP1 software and other items which are known to cause issues, such as:

• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - KB949325
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - KB944899 (v1)
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - KB945140 (SP1 Beta)

If you encounter issues installing SP1, uninstall technologies and/or development add-ins not listed above, and then try SP1 Setup again. Only the following technologies have been tested and verified to work with SP1:

• Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 2 & Silverlight Tools Beta 2. (If Silverlight Tools Beta 2 is already installed, you must upgrade it after you install Visual Studio 2008 SP1. To upgrade, use the installer on the Silverlight Tools Beta 2 page on the Microsoft Download Center Web site.)
• MVC Preview Release #3
• ASP.NET Extensions/Dynamic Data Preview
• VC 2008 Feature Pack
• VB PowerPack Controls (2.0 & 3.0)
• Expression Studio 2 (RTM)
• SQL Server 2008
• .NET Framework 3.5 SDK
• XSLT Profiler
• VSTA 2.0 SDK
• Visual Studio 2008 SDK