Why I don't use Dreamweaver - or How to lose 2 hours with a single character
I don't use Dreamweaver personally - I've used CFEclipse for pretty much all CF development since August 2004.
Some of my colleagues however (mainly those of a less code centric bent) do persist in using Dreamweaver - although after this fiasco, at least one of them may move over to CFEclipse.
A colleague asked for my assistance because Dreamweaver had crashed on his machine, and when he tried to reload it Dreamweaver would close immediately after displaying the splash screen.
I initially suspected that Dreamweaver's site cache may have become corrupt when Dreamweaver crashed, and that this might be preventing Dreamweaver from reloading. After a brief google, I found this adobe technote which gives instructions on diagnosing and fixing these kind of issues.
I started by deleting Dreamweaver's site cache - this was progress, as Dreamweaver now took slightly longer to crash, as it had to rebuild the site cache first.
I then renamed the key in the registry that Dreamweaver uses to store its site definitions. Dreamweaver now loaded without crashing.
I then restored the site definitions, and went through removing sites until I had identified which site had caused Dreamweaver to crash (Which not surprisingly was the one he had been working on before Dreamweaver crashed).
My colleague then attempted to recreate the site, but as Dreamweaver attempted to build the site cache, once again it crashed (although it did at least give a (meaningless) error message this time. Fortunately it did crash before saving the site definition - otherwise we would have had to delete the site from the registry again.
My colleague then tested creating another site, pointing to a different location, and had no problem in doing so. This suggested to me that there must be something in one of the files in the problem site that Dreamweaver did not like - possibly an invalid character in the middle of being written to a file when Dreamweaver crashed.
I then instructed my colleague to check all the files that had changed since last checkin - opening them individually to look for anything strange - strange characters, mid file truncation etc.
The 6th file he attempted to open, immediately caused Dreamweaver to crash.
So what, you may ask, was the problem with this file?
The file was a css file.
The invalid line:
So, there you go - inadvertently inserting a quote mid dimension in a css file, will cause Dreamweaver to go FooBar - and, because of the site cache, this will prevent you from opening the site at all!
You know, I did suggest that option (throwing the machine out of the window) after about an hour - for some reason our MD did not think this a viable option :(
It seems even the most recent version of Dreamweaver don't get on well with commented CSS files :(
<div class="code">#sign img, {</div>
my house and my stress levels thank you all for sharing.
As you and others have mentioned, I too was editing a .css file when it crashed. The bit that apparently crashed me was a reference in the .css to a class file that I hadn't put in yet in the .html file: .h_link h2 a { display: block; height: 30px; } .h_link h2 a:hover { background: transparent; }
The class had originally been a div id and I was trying to save myself some extra cod by trying it as a class instead. It crashed right after I changed the id to a class and saved the .css file. Putting the two lines back as an ID instead of a class fixed things.
Again, thanks so much for this fix.
My Dreamweaver (CS3, Windows XP) crashes when I try to open a particular ASP file. I stripped my code and eventually found the cause of this problem. It crashes when I add this line in my code:
"Set comProfLocSet = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Command")"
When I delete this line, or when I edit this line (rename comProfLocSet to comProfLocZet) it runs fine...
I have no clue why, but it works fine. I might be the name of the object (comProfLocSet), but it's very strange.
email me at "fred ((((at))) thought foundry (dot) com"
I was having a weird problem in dreamweaver... Whenever I was in code view and typed "shift+i" to make a capital "I", instead it would paste from the clipboard.
I finally figured out what was happening. I compared the menu.xml in my app support folder in the user library to the original menu.xml file that was in the application folder. I went through until I came across the diff:
menu.xml in my library/app support folder:
<!-- Windows Navigation Shortcuts -->
<shortcut key="Cmd+Ins" name="Copy2" platform="" command="if (dw.canClipCopy()) { dw.clipCopy() }" domRequired="FALSE" id="DWShortcuts_HTMLSource_Copy2" />
<shortcut key="Shift+Ins" name="Paste2" platform="" command="if (dw.canClipPaste()) { dw.clipPaste() }" domRequired="FALSE" id="DWShortcuts_HTMLSource_Paste2" />
<shortcut key="Shift+Del" name="Cut2" platform="" command="if (dw.canClipCut()) { dw.clipCut() }" domRequired="FALSE" id="DWShortcuts_HTMLSource_Cut2" />
orig menu.xml file:
<!-- Windows Navigation Shortcuts -->
<shortcut key="Cmd+Ins" name="Copy2" platform="" command="if (dw.canClipCopy()) { dw.clipCopy() }" domRequired="FALSE" id="DWShortcuts_HTMLSource_Copy2" />
<shortcut key="Shift+Ins" name="Paste2" platform="" command="if (dw.canClipPaste()) { dw.clipPaste() }" domRequired="FALSE" id="DWShortcuts_HTMLSource_Paste2" />
<shortcut key="Shift+Del" name="Cut2" platform="" command="if (dw.canClipCut()) { dw.clipCut() }" domRequired="FALSE" id="DWShortcuts_HTMLSource_Cut2" />
There was a diff in the "platform=" tags. The orig stated [platform="win"], my config stated [platform=""] (nothing in between the ""'s). So, I reset the platform tag to be [platform="win"] in my settings and then relaunched dreamweaver. It fixed the problem.
Not sure how this occurred, but it works now.
http://www.mikepadgett.com/blog/template_permalink...
Thanks a lot!! If I had just seen this in the morning. I uninstalled, reinstalled, made a new user .... $%#^^
I've spend several hours reïnstalling DW CS3 and deleteing keys and caches because of crashes.
At first, it wouldn't startup at all. Later on it crashed when rolling over the files of a particular site only (the one I was working on).
I found your issue. I changed my CSS comment:
/* INTRO PHOTO'S */
to
/* INTRO PHOTOS */
And that was all. ONE SINGE CARACTER was causing a mayor crash and after that not even starting up again!!
I've removed it with the freeware Cream text editor... Wich I'll probably will use more ofter in the future ;)
Thank you very much for sharing this, I wouln't have found this myself.
(actually it was in Dutch: intro foto's)
C:\Users\<user ID>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration\SiteCache
I use Vista.
Have a great day!