Recovering Your Work After an Expression Web Crash

I am getting a little tired of Expression Web 4 crashing on me.

I'm not sure why I'm repeatedly encountering issues with the latest version of Expression Web, but I suspect -- given the frequency at which it is crashing -- it may have something to do with the TFS integration. Note that this is purely a guess on my part, but I find it hard to believe that the memory corruption bug I'm experiencing would not have been caught by one of the SDETs (a.k.a. Testers) on the Expression Web team.

Perhaps the source of my woes is not the TFS integration at all, but rather something to do with the fact that I use a non-trivial ASP.NET master page when creating/editing pages. I guess it really doesn't matter -- I just want it to stop crashing regardless.

As I noted in a previous post, I've been using Expression Web for a number of years to manage content on my MSDN blog. While I'm obviously a little irritated this morning with the tool, overall I'm still satisfied with my method of creating and editing HTML content. It sure beats using the Web-based editing features in the Telligent Community platform. [That's not meant to bash the Telligent functionality; for many people -- heck, perhaps thousands and thousands of folks out there -- the "WYSIWYG" editors provided by Telligent are probably more than sufficient to address their needs. I simply prefer much tighter control over the HTML content...but, alas, I digress.]

[Ugh...the application just crashed again on me (second time this morning). Thankfully I had just pressed CTRL+S about a minute ago -- so the "damage" wasn't nearly as bad as it was earlier this morning.]

A few hours ago I was authoring a new blog post (not this one -- a different one that hopefully more people will find valuable than this one) and after about 45 minutes of typing, revising, and typing some more, Expression Web suddenly crashed:

Problem signature:
 Problem Event Name: BEX
 Application Name: ExpressionWeb.exe
 Application Version: 4.0.1165.0
 Application Timestamp: 4bfaf4bc
 Fault Module Name: StackHash_0a9e
 Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
 Fault Module Timestamp: 00000000
 Exception Offset: 00000000
 Exception Code: c0000005
 Exception Data: 00000008
 OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
 Locale ID: 1033
 Additional Information 1: 0a9e
 Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
 Additional Information 3: 0a9e
 Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
At first, I was horrified. Almost an hour's worth of work down the drain!

In hindsight, I can't believe I didn't save my work-in-progress. [That "auto-save/auto-recover" functionality in the various Microsoft Office apps (that everyone is now accustomed to -- including me) really should be mandatory for all "desktop" applications created by Microsoft.]

After resisting the temptation to curse something I won't type here -- or, even worse, slam my fist into the keyboard (come on, we've all had those moments) -- I took a deep breath and decided to actually try to do something constructive for a change. In the past couple of months, when Expression Web crashed, I would simply click the link to send my crash info to Microsoft (a.k.a. the Watson bucket) and restart the application. Then I would open my Web site again and start typing the lost work as best I could from memory. [Sending crash reports to Microsoft is definitely constructive -- in that it helps identify problematic code -- but it certainly doesn't address your immediate desire to recover your lost work.]

Read more: Random Musings of Jeremy Jameson

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