I have been given a project that is the biggest pile of spaghetti I have ever seen, with 0 unit tests or any obvious naming conventions.
I find it hard to believe there is still no way while running in Debug to have Visual Studio automatically break on the next executing line of solution code.
In this case, I know the code is hitting a specific 5000 line of code file - but there isn't even an easy way to just write a breakpoint to every single line!
Is there any logical reason why in 2017 (or even 2010) this functionality doesn't exist?
Or perhaps it does and I haven't found out how!
Is there any logical reason why in 2017 (or even 2010) this functionality doesn't exist?
Please Put a break point in your code -> debug, then Right click on the text editor in VS, you will see below:
You can use the "Break all" button in the visual studio (Ctrl+Alt+Break is the default shortcut).
You might need to switch between the running threads in order to see highlighted instruction within your code.
Then you can just continue debugging, as usual.
If you do not see any of those two controls, go to View->Toolbars and check both "Debug" and "Debug Location".
I am using the Visual Micro extension for Microsoft Visual Studio, which allows me to debug my Arduino project (in opposed to the Sketch IDE).
For some strange reason, when no breakpoints are present, it automatically adds a breakpoint at the beginning of the loop function.
When running via the debugger, I can simply remove it and continue running.
However, I cannot do the same when running without a debugger (i.e., upon power-up), since breakpoints seem to be "embedded" into the code as additional code segments (though I'm not really sure how explain the fact that the debugger allows me to remove a breakpoint).
Here is an illustration of the problem:
Now, I've been able to work-around it by adding a piece of "dead code" with a breakpoint:
if (0)
{
// insert a breakpoint here
}
But this feels kinda "clumsy".
I suppose that if there is a solution to this problem, then it lies somewhere in here:
But I have not able to find it, so any help will be highly appreciated.
Found the answer!
It turns out that all I needed was to hover on top of the breakpoint and read the tooltip carefully:
As you can read on the bottom line of this tooltip, in order to switch off that automatically-generated breakpoint, we only need to disable the Visual Micro's Tutorial Mode:
And voilà - we're all done!
This is occurring in Visual Studio 2005, in an ASP.NET Web Application.
For example, if I try to set a breakpoint in the following code:
if (frustrated)
{
bool cry = true;
} <-- breakpoint here
It will set the breakpoint on the indicator margin, but when I actually hit F5 to debug the application, the breakpoint will flicker on and off (the little red circle literally vanishes then reappears) before disappearing altogether. Other breakpoints will work, just not ones ending on a closing bracket. This used to work, until I installed then uninstalled ReSharper (either it broke it, or its just coincidence).
EDIT: Just to reiterate - this is something that used to work, but doesn't anymore. I know I can put the breakpoint on a different line, but this is not what I want to do. I want it to work normally again.
EDIT 2: Resetting all of my settings did not help.
Any ideas?
Set the breakpoint on the line above it, instead of a closing brace.
If the breakpoint turns from a solid circle to an empty circle it indicates that the breakpoint could not be set usually because of a mismatch between the code and the actual binary module being loaded. This can be fixed by building or rebuilding suspect modules.
All projects opened while ReSharper was installed were affected. I went through each project and deleted the .suo file. After that, life was good - I can set breakpoints again!
In my Visual Studio instance, even if I just wrote a single line of return in a C# console application, it will take me a minute after pressing F5 to execute the actual code (I mean the time it takes to stop on the single return statement after pressing F5 -- I set a breakpoint on the return statement in the main function). What is wrong? Is there a check list?
I am using Visual Studio 2008 VSTS edition and debugging on Windows Server 2003 x64.
You may need to delete all your breakpoints---note that you need to click the "Delete all breakpoints" button (or use Ctrl + Shift + F9), NOT just delete them one by one. If Visual Studio has mangled your solution settings the latter will not work. You may need to add a breakpoint first, in order for this to work (clever, eh?).
If worst comes to worst, you may need to delete your .suo file and let Visual Studio start a new one from scratch. Note that you will lose your personal solution configuration settings, however (only for this solution, not any others). However, you may want to move/rename the file temporarily until you determine whether or not this is the problem; that way, you can always move it back. I have seen some online resources recommend deleting (moving/renaming) the .ncb file as well.
I have seen this before. Try deleting all your breakpoints and then set the ones you want. Hit F5. Is it faster now?
I just noticed that you mentioned setting up the .NET source debugging feature. Try to disable that. Your network connectivity to Microsoft's source server may be slow. Also disable any symbol server connectivity in menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.
Also try disabling "Enable property evaluation and other implicit function calls" in menu Tools → Options → Debugging → General.
Or remove your .suo file which can be found next to your solution (.sln) file.
This solved an issue I had with debug sessions taking a long time to start and stop.
I had this problem. After trying all the listed advice and removing all Visual Studio extensions, we finally figured out that somehow IntelliTrace was enabled. Disabling that fixed everything.
How to: Enable and Disable IntelliTrace
Do you have a lot of breakpoints set? Those can really slow down startup time. Everytime a new module is loaded into the process address space, they all need to be checked to see if they are valid.
Go to menu Tools → Options → Debugger → Symbols and check if you have public symbols set or UNC network paths set. Also check menu Tools* → Options → Debugger → General to see if you have source server set.
All of these can affect debugging based on slow network speed or unavailable servers. The 5 minute wait time is network timeouts.
If nothing in options is set, check to see if you have the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable set.
My colleague had a very slowly responding Visual Studio, and it literally took minutes to perform a step while debugging.
The root cause turned out to be an anti virus program (Threatfire) that went crazy while Visual Studio was running. Killing its process immediately fixed everything.
In my case changing the debug symbol "Automatically load symbol for" option from "All modules" to "Only specified modules" solved the problem. You can change this option from menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.
A different cause plus... How to find the problem
To me it was the option ShowOtherThreadIpMarkers. A value of 1 makes Visual Studio (2010) unbearably slow (3-5 seconds for each debug step. With a value of 0, it is fast again.
What is it that option? I have no idea. I could not find it through the Visual Studio user interface.
I unchecked all possible debugging options in there and nothing worked.
So I went to Import/Export Settings and loaded my old settings I've previously saved going backward in time until Visual Studio was fast again, then compared the vssettings files..., etc., etc.
I'd like to remark that if you load the settings while you are in debug mode stopped on a breakpoint, they become effective immediately. You don't have to stop the debugger and restart.
From ScottGu's blog linked by Travis: "One other performance gotcha I've heard about recently is an issue that a few people have reported running into with the Google Toolbar add-in. For some reason this can sometimes cause long delays when attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the browser. If you are seeing long delays with your web application loading, and have the Google Toolbar (or other toolbars) installed, you might want to try uninstalling them to see if that is the cause of the issue."
Running under the debugger for me was roughly 10x slower than running without debugging.
After trying every solution suggested here, I went through every debugger setting and enabled/disabled to see if it made a difference.
For me, it turned out that disabling Suppress JIT optimization on module load in the debug settings massively improved things.
Make sure you don't have any stale network mappings to servers that no longer exist (network timeouts will kill you). Or use something like Process Monitor to see if a network (or other file error) seems to be blocking for a long time.
Are you using a symbolsServer to download symbols for Windows DLL files?
If so, disable that as it can take some time, but I wouldn't expect that to cause long delays in a basic console application.
Menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.
I know this is an old topic, but for what it's worth...
I've found that if I've had a separate Internet Explorer window open for a long time it can take up to a minute to start debugging. Close all Internet Explorer windows and debugging starts immediately.
In my case Google Toolbar was slowing down my debugging.
gplus_notifications_gadget.html just kept going on and on overloading the debugger. I wanted to keep the Google Toolbar because I use it on a regular basis, so I just disabled the G+ notification button (the small button besides the profile button). It is happy now.
I had the same issue in Visual Studio 2010, with stepping in the code excruciatingly slow (between 3 to 10 seconds). However, none of the above settings modification did the trick.
I eventually found the ultimate solution, which would work in all of the above post issues: reset all your settings, as described here (essentially menu Tools → Import and Export Settings, Reset all settings, with saving existing settings to a file (for reverting)).
You may first want to save a particular part of your settings. For instance, I first saved my color theme (Solarized-like) and then restored it after the global reset.
For me, the setting that killed performance (Windows 8 even hanged except for mouse movement) was to uncheck "Break all processes when one process breaks" in menu Options → Debugging → General.
Just one more cause of a slow Visual Studio debugging experience...
Long time ago I enabled FusionLog to see what was causing an assembly binding problem.
Make sure you disable it after using it. Why? Because it writes a lot of logging data to the disk while enabled.
This is the FusionLog key on Window's Registry (regedit.exe):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion
Change the ForceLog, LogImmersive and LogResourseBindings values from 1 (enabled) to 0 (disabled).
I had this problem too, but it had nothing to do with breakpoints in my case. It was code shortcuts that I added in the tasks window:
http://www.customsoftwareframeworks.com/blog/longwaittimetoinsertoraddalineoftextbuginvisualstudio--tasklistwindow--onlywhenaddingandremovelines
I'm sure there are other ways you could see a problem like this, but there is a bug somewhere that caused this problem for me...deleting all my options would have fixed this, but that is something that I did not want to do. So, I debugged it and wrote about it in my blog...your problem sounds like mine.
Something that has worked for me is to make sure there are no conditional break points. Other than that, I have had success fixing slow debugging by simply restarting Visual Studio and only opening one instance of Visual Studio at a time.
I had a similar issue and none of the other guidance seemed to help. I had rebooted to no avail. I had removed all breakpoints, deleted the .suo file, checked that symbols weren't being loaded from external sources, and checked that no paths existed in the application that was unavailable.
Then, I thought to clean the solution. I noticed in the output window that C# IntelliSense reported an issue when cleaning:
There was a problem reading metadata
from
'{B0C3592F-F0D1-4B79-BE20-3AD610B07C23}'
('The system cannot find the file
specified.'). IntelliSense may not
work properly until the solution is
reloaded.
In this case, once you actually discover the error message, it tells you exactly how to resolve it. (Good job on the error text, poor job on discoverability!) I unloaded the solution's projects, then reloaded them. I was then able to successfully run clean solution. It worked, and the debugger did as well.
Closing the "Autos" window improved debugging for me in Visual Studio 2008 for a big native C++ solution.
Hiding it won't work. It needs to be closed.
I experienced the same slowdown and disconnecting from the network fixed the problem for me as some other comments and answers have stated (but of course that is not an ideal fix).
For my case this one simple change fixed my solution: In the project properties on the debug tab I disabled "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process" (I am running Visual Studio 2010).
Get more memory and a faster HD. More details are here.
Is there a good way to debug errors in the Visual Studio Designer?
In our project we have tons of UserControls and many complex forms. For the complex ones, the Designer often throws various exceptions which doesn't help much, and I was wondering if there's some nice way to figure out what has gone wrong.
The language is C#, and we're using Visual Studio 2005.
I've been able to debug some control designer issues by running a second instance of VS, then from your first VS instance do a "Debug -> Attach to Process" and pick "devenv".
The first VS instance is where you'll set your breakpoints. Use the second instance to load up the designer to cause the "designer" code to run.
See Debugging Design-Time Controls (MSDN).
It has been a pain in 2005 and still is in 2015. Breakpoints will often not hit, probably because of the assemblies being shadow copied or something by the designer(?). The best you can do is to break manually by introducing a call to Debugger.Break(). You may wrap it into a compiler conditional as so:
#if DEBUG
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
#endif
int line_to = break; // <- if a simple breakpoint here does not suffice
I have had this happen many times and it is a real pain.
Firstly I'd suggest attempting to follow the stack trace provided by the designer, though I found that often simply lists a bunch of internals stuff that isn't much use.
If that doesn't work then try compiling and determining the exception from there. You really are flying blind which is the problem. You could then try simply running the code and seeing what exception is raised when you run it, that should give you some more information.
A last-gasp approach could be to remove all the non-generated code from the form and gradually re-introduce it to determine the error.
If you're using custom controls you could manually remove the generated code related to the custom controls as well if the previous method still results in an error. You could then re-introduce this step-by-step in the same way to determine which custom control is causing the problem, then go and debug that separately.
Basically as far as I can tell there's no real way around the problem other than to slog it out a bit!
I discovered why sometimes breakpoints are not hit. In the Attach to Process dialog, "Attach to:" type has to be "Select..."'d.
Once I changed to "Managed 4.0, 4.5", breakpoints for a WinRT application were hit. Source: Designer Debugging in WinRT.
Each one is different and they can sometimes be obscure. As a first step, I would do the following:
Use source control and save often. When a designer error occurs, get a list of all changes to the affected controls that have occurred recently and test each one until you find the culprit
Be sure to check out the initialization routines of the controls involved. Very often these errors will occur because of some error or bad dependency that is called through the default constructor for a control (an error that may only manifest itself in VS)
You can run a second instance of VS and attach it to the first instance of VS (Ctrl+Alt+P). In the first instance set the breakpoints, in the second instance run the designer, and the breakpoint will fire. You can step through the code, but Edit-and-Continue will not work.
For Edit-and-Continue to work, set you control library's debug options to run a VS with the command line argument being the solution filename. Then you can simply set the breakpoints and hit F5. It will debug just like user code! As a side note, you can do this will VS and Office add-ins also.
This worked for me for Visual Studio 2022:
I opened a second Visual Studio instance
In the second instance I clicked Debug -> Attach to Process...
I selected DesignToolsServer from the process list
More details: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/controls/walkthrough-debugging-custom-windows-forms-controls-at-design-time?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8