Recently, whenever I change something in my code, rebuild, and attempt to debug, I get the error "This breakpoint will not currently be hit, No symbols have been loaded for this document."
But then as soon as I restart my computer, everything is fine and I can debug properly. Why is this happening? It's really frustrating having to restart my desktop every time I try to debug my code. I've looked all over stack overflow and MSDN and can't find any solution to my particular problem. Any help is appreciated
"This breakpoint will not currently be hit, No symbols have been loaded
for this document."
(As for this error message, it's common error which has different causes. I can't give the most direct correct answer for this issue, I can only give you some tips for trouble-shooting. In order to avoid losing contact in the round-trip comments, I post those content as answer instead of comments.)
Since VS2015 have been released for long time, I would think this issue is a particular one, not found similar issues online.
First of all, please create a new simple project to check if this issue occurs in new project when debugging.
If it persists in new project, I think this issue has something to do outside environment like VS settings, VS config files or Debug options.
You can try:
1.Go Tools=>Import and Export Settings=>Reset all settings =>No,just reset settings=>Finish
2.Repair VS IDE since it seems to work well in the past, and just got the issue recently, so maybe something is broken for your IDE(In Control Panel find VS2015, right-click=>change=>repair). Also, make sure you have the latest VS2015 Update3 instead of earlier versions.
And if it works well in new project, then maybe the issue is about the whole project or solution itself. You can try:
1.Navigate to solution folder, close all vs instance, delete the .vs, bin and obj folders and restart VS to check if it helps.
2.Make sure you've loaded the required symbols, check the content in your Modules window during debugging, there's possibility you don't load necessary symbols successfully.
3.Check the output folder after your rebuild, check in folder like bin\debug folder if you have both the .exe and .pdb files. And make sure the .exe and .pdb files are up-to-date after your rebuild by checking their Date Modified.
Hope it helps and more info about the project type, dependencies would be better:)
I'm very new to Visual Studio and Universal Windows Apps Development. As a part of the course, I have this codeSHOW project provided.
I've cloned it successfully in VS 2015, but I can't run the project using the .sln file. Error:
Here's the error log: http://pastebin.com/c012Bba4
I have no clue how to fix it, and the issues on github go unanswered so I can't expect much from there.
This is an known issue in Visual Studio 2015.
The problem is with files with the exact same name under different folders in a Shared project, which in your case is "resources.resjson".
The only workarounds are either to make the file names unique and if that is not an option, to duplicate the files in the projects instead of sharing them out of the Shared project.
This is a VS2015 specific bug, the solution loads just fine on VS2013. You can get some insight into what is going wrong. First note that your got two message boxes that announced this error. Barely visible in your screenshot.
The failure.txt file gives more hints, you can see the stack traces of the two AggregateException that are raised when the solution is loaded. You'll see that two tasks are trying to load the same resources.resjon project item. Not correct of course, quacks like a standard concurrency bug.
Nothing actually goes wrong, Visual Studio can handle the exception and declares it "Recoverable", the projects are still loaded correctly. And compile just fine. Only other thing you need is the Bing Maps SDK, you can download the correct version here.
If you have VS2013 then prefer that version, it doesn't have this bug and loads the solution without any complaint. And minimizes the odds that you'll run into other quirky problems. Given the current stability of VS2015, not great, it is the best way to avoid losing time. Otherwise just ignore the mishap and close the message boxes, some future Update will no doubt fix the bug. You can report it at connect.microsoft.com if you wish. Not actually necessary I think, it looks like VS is phoning home.
Recently I started to get this message randomly:
Metadata file '...\Release\project.dll' could not be found in Visual Studio
I have a solution with several projects in it. The current build mode is Debug and all projects' configurations are set to Debug. But when I try to run the main project - sometimes it gives me a few errors, all of which are "Metadata file '...\Release\projectX.dll' could not be found" - and, look, it says about RELEASE folder, though current mode is Debug. Why? I tried to search for reference to "Release\projectX.dll" inside all solution files, and I found one in ResolveAssemblyReference.cache file.
I made a good search over the Internet and found a few people with a similar problem, but there was no solution, or at least no working solution.
I tried to delete references to those projects and read them, but in some time I start getting these errors again.
It seems like a bug. Why does it search for referenced projects in Release folders when I always use Debug mode?
PS. For those who met this problem: I couldn't solve it in an easy way. It disappeared only after I reinstalled Windows :(
Everyone is correct...try everything...(in order of a little to a lot of time wasted)
Do you have bad code? Fix that first.
Clean Solution & Restart Visual Studio
Remove / Add References
Check your build order w/ larger projects and verify
Manually rebuild sub-projects
Manually copy dlls between projects into associated bin folders
Go get some coffee, play some pinball and come back tomorrow...you may think of something else in the meanwhile.
I had the exact same problem. Big visual studio solution with 50+ projects.
All references were added as projects.
Project build order was correct (right click on project and select build order).
However when building some of the higher level projects the "root" project they depended on were not built.
The problem was that these projects were not selected to build under the current configuration (don't know how this happened).
To check this select "Configuration Manager" (Build menu) e check if the problematic projects are set to build.
When you say you deleted references to those projects and re-added them, how did you re-add them, exactly? Did you use the "Browse" tab in the "Add Reference" dialog in Visual Studio? Or, did you use the "Projects" tab (which lists neighboring projects in your solution)?
Edit: If you use the "Browse" tab, and manually add the reference to your .dll that is located in the /Release folder, then Visual Studio will always look for the .dll in that location, regardless of what mode you're currently in (Debug or Release).
If you removed the actual .dll file from the Release folder (either manually or by doing "Clean Solution"), then your reference will break because the .dll does not exist.
I'd suggest removing the reference to ProjectX.dll, and add it in again--but this time, use the "Projects" tab in the "Add Reference" dialog. When you add a reference this way, Visual Studio knows where to get the appropriate .dll. If you're in Debug mode, it will get it from the /Debug folder. If in Release mode, the /Release folder. Your build error should go away, and you also will no longer be (improperly) referencing a Release .dll while in Debug mode.
Well, my answer is not just the summary of all the solutions, but it offers more than that.
Section (1):
In general solutions:
I had 4 errors of this kind (‘metadata file could not be found’) along with 1 error saying 'Source File Could Not Be Opened (‘Unspecified error ‘)'.
I tried to get rid of ‘metadata file could not be found’ error. For that, I read many posts, blogs etc and found these solutions may be effective (summarizing them over here):
Restart VS and try building again.
Go to 'Solution Explorer'. Right click on Solution. Go to Properties. Go to 'Configuration Manager'. Check if the checkboxes under 'Build' are checked or not. If any or all of them are unchecked, then check them and try building again.
If the above solution(s) do not work, then follow sequence mentioned in step 2 above, and even if all the checkboxes are checked, uncheck them, check again and try to build again.
Build Order and Project Dependencies:
Go to 'Solution Explorer'. Right click on Solution. Go to 'Project Dependencies...'. You will see 2 tabs: 'Dependencies' and 'Build Order'. This build order is the one in which solution builds. Check the project dependencies and the build order to verify if some project (say 'project1') which is dependent on other (say 'project2') is trying to build before that one (project2). This might be the cause for the error.
Check the path of the missing .dll:
Check the path of the missing .dll. If the path contains space or any other invalid path character, remove it and try building again.
If this is the cause, then adjust the build order.
Section (2):
My particular case:
I tried all the steps above with various permutations and combinations with restarting VS few times. But, it did not help me.
So, I decided to get rid of other error I was coming across ('Source File Could Not Be Opened (‘Unspecified error ‘)').
I came across a blog:
http://www.anujvarma.com/tfs-errorsource-file-could-not-be-opened-unspecified-error/#comment-1539
I tried the steps mentioned in that blog and I got rid of the error 'Source File Could Not Be Opened (‘Unspecified error ‘)' and surprisingly I got rid of other errors (‘metadata file could not be found’) as well.
Section (3):
Moral of the story:
Try all solutions as mentioned in section (1) above (and any other solutions) for getting rid of the error. If nothing works out, as per the blog mentioned in section (2) above, delete the entries of all source files which are no longer present in the source control and the file system from your .csproj file.
I've had this problem before and the only way I've found to solve it is to run Clean Solution and then restart Visual Studio.
For me it's usually the target framework being off (4.5.2 instead of 4.6) If you fix the target framework of the project to match the target framework of the solution and build, a new .dll will be created.
Re-open Visual Studio as Administrator.
Most of the answares say that you need to remove the libraries of your solution, this is true but when you re-add the libraries the error will be shown again. You need to verify if all the libraries referenced have a compatible .net framework with the .net framework of your solution. Then fix all the errors in your code and rebuild the solution.
Did you check the Configuration manager settings? In the project settings dialog top right corner.
Sometimes it happens that between all the release entries a debug entry comes in.
If so, the auto dependency created by the dependency graph of the solution gets all confused.
I've also seen this error in solutions where I have multiple projects (usually netTiers projects where I've updated one or more of the sub-projects to target the 4.0 framework). It can be problematic to remove. Oftentimes it can be resolved, however, by first fixing all other errors in sub-projects (eg, any missing references), individually rebuilding those sub-projects, then removing/adding back any references to those sub-projects in Visual Studio. Personally, I've had little luck resolving this error by cleaning the solution alone.
We recently ran into this issue after upgrading to Office 2010 from Office 2007 - we had to manually change references in our project to version 14 of the Office Interops we use in some projects.
Hope that helps - took us a few days to figure it out.
In my case it was caused by two things (VS.2012):
1) One of the projects was configured for AnyCPU instead of x86
2) A project that was referenced had somehow the "Build" checkbox unchecked.
Do check your Build | Configuration Manager to get an overview of what is being built and for which platform. Also make sure you check it for both Debug & Release as they may have different settings.
In my case, I had some errors in my code. Visual Studio showed the error you had instead of the actual errors, like syntax errors or unknown class names. Try cleaning the solution and building project after project. This way you will discover the actual errors.
Again, this is just what cause the error for me.
I had this problem and took long while to figure it out. Problem came up when I removed projects from solution and replaced those with nuget packages.
Solution seemed to be fine but the .csproj file still contained those projects multiple times as reference.
Seems that VS does not clean that file appropriately. It was still referencing the removed projects under the hood. When manually removed the references from csproj file all works again! wohoo
This problem is due to pdb files or CodeContracts.
To resolve it:
Clean your output folder and rebuild the solution.
Re-Configure the CodeContracts or disable it for temporary build.
We have that problem quite often, but only with references to C++/CLI projects from C# projects. It's obviously a bug deep down in Visual Studio that Microsoft decided not to fix, because it's 'too complex' and they promised an overhaul of the C++ build system which is now targeted for Visual Studio 2010.
That was some time ago, and maybe the fix even went into Visual Studio 2008; I didn't follow up on it any more. However, our typical workaround was
Switch configuration
Restart Visual Studio
Build the solution
I had the same problem myself.
Visual Studio 2013 only told me that it couldn't reference to it, and it couldn't find the metadata. When I opened my solution (which has multiple projects in it) it said that I was using projects lower than the framework version of one of my projects.
So I switched everything to version 4.5, and it worked again.
I seem to recall having a similar problem a few months ago. I solved it temporarily by copying the referenced DLL to the Release folder, thus satisfying Visual Studio's expectations. Later, I discovered the reference to the Release DLL in my actual code. You should try doing a search through the entire project for \release\project.dll.
Also, I have noticed that Visual Studio unit test projects sometimes put a "DeploymentItem" attribute on each of the test methods pointing to your target DLL, and if you switch between Debug and Release, Visual Studio can get confused if the DLL is no longer in the expected location. In my experience, these attributes can be safely deleted if you didn't put them there yourself as part of a "single deployment" scenario.
I had this problem and it was due to an invalid method in the offending library (dll) that did not return a value, e.g.
public bool DoSomething()
{
//I never bothered putting code here....
}
When I commmented this out everything compiled :)
Sometimes VS2010 switches my configuration from Any CPU to Mixed Platforms. When this happens I get this error message.
To resolve it I switch back to Any CPU:
1. Right click on the solution and select properties.
2. Click on Configuration Properties and then the Configuration Manager... button.
3. Under Active solution platform select Any CPU
I find that this usually occurs to me when i still have a method declaration in an interface, which a class implements, but that i had later removed and had forgotten to remove it from the interface as well. I usually just save the entire solution every 30mins n then just revert back to an earlier version if i cant find the error.
I ended up deleting my references (I had added them properly using the projects tab, and they used to build just fine), hand editing my .csproj files and removing bizarre entries that didn't belong -- and setting my outputs for debug and release, x86 and x64 and any cpu to all be "\bin" -- I built it once, then re-added the reference (again, using the projects tab), and everything started working again for me. Didn't have to restart Visual Studio at all.
For me this was caused by the Build target having been rewritten to not output the dll. Removing this to fall back on the default Build target fixed the issue.
For me was to remove/delete entire .vs folder(that is an invisible one) and then:
- Build
- Rebuild
and done.
in my case i was working on a branch off master. so i checked out master branch, ran a build and then checked out my branch. It fixed the issue. If you already are on master, i suggest you check out previous commit and then build it.
It seems to happen when you checkout a solution with multiple projects that have references between them, and you haven't built it before. If you have references directly to the dlls, instead of referencing the project, you'll get this message.
You should always use the Projects tab in the Add Reference dialog to add a reference to a project in the same solution. This way, VS can know the correct order in which to build the solution
same happened to me today as described by Vidar.
I have a Build error in a Helper Library (which is referenced by other projects) and instead of telling me that there's an error in Helper Library, the compiler comes up with list of MetaFile-not-found type errors. After correcting the Build error in Helper Library, the MetaFile errors gone.
Is there any setting in VS to improve this?
I had the same problem. I noticed that my db context (EF4) that was located in the project dll wasn't recognize for some reason. I deleted it and created another one instead. and that solved it for me.
Had the same problem today.
My application, a Windows Forms applications, accidently had a reference to itself. Weird.
Once removed, the error went away.
The reference got added each time I dragged a user control, located in the Windows Forms project itself, to a form.
I had the same problem. Manually removing and adding the dlls did not help. ClassLibraries did not compile for all the projects and were missing in the ...\bin\Debug folder for the project [because I cleaned solution by mistake]. Since the class library did not compile that means there may be some errors somewhere in one of those sub projects.
Solution: Since my dlls were there for the ...\bin\Release folder, I tried to rebuild on Release mode and found an error on one line in one of the sub projects. Solving the error and rebuilding the solution got rid off the build error.
I have a VS2005 solution which contains a variety of projects (C++ DLLs, C++ static libraries, C# assemblies, C++ windows executables) that are combined in various ways to produce several executables. For some reason, every time I open the solution, VS2005 wants to check out one of the projects for editing. The project is not modified in any way, it's just checked out. If I configure VS2005 to prompt before checking out, I can cancel the auto-checkout during load with no ill effect that I can see. It may or may not be relevant, but the project it keeps checking out is cppunit version 1.12.0 (the static lib version). How can I stop this annoying behavior?
Other potentially relevant (or not) details:
Source control is Team Foundation Server (not Visual SourceSafe)
no .suo or .ncb files are checked in
the .vcproj and .vspscc files are being checked out
When I close the solution or shut down Visual Studio, I'm asked whether I want to save changes to the project. Answering yes results in no changes to the file (Kdiff3 compares my local file to the server version and reports"files are binary equal")
Attempting to check in the "modified" files results in a Visual Studio message saying "No Changes to Check In. All of the changes were either unmodified files or locks. The changes have been undone by the server"
As Charles and Graeme have hinted at, Visual Studio constantly make changes to user option files and such on the backed even if you don't make changes to the project directly.
I'm not sure what information is being stored but I do know that it happens. Common remedies is to not include the *.suo files. I also don't stored anything in the bin or obj folders in sauce control as this can have a similar effect as your talking about (if you build). (Checks out the project upon a build. Thought this does take an action to happen).
Overall it is unavoidable. It is just how VS2005, 2008 work.
Does this answer your question?
Regards,
Frank
There are two reasons I've encountered that cause this behavior.
The first is old source control bindings. If you have a project that used to be managed by another source control tool, it might have leftover bindings in the project file. Open the project file, and change the following settings from something like this:
SccProjectName="$/Team/Platform/Projects/MyProject"
SccAuxPath="http://teamFoundationServer.example.com:8080"
SccLocalPath="."
SccProvider="{88888888-4444-4444-4444-BBBBBBBBBBBB}"
to this:
SccProjectName="SAK"
SccAuxPath="SAK"
SccLocalPath="SAK"
SccProvider="SAK"
Different project types are defined in different ways. The above example is from a .vcproj, C# projects are in XML, VB looks like something else, but the meanings are the same. Simply set all four values to the constant string "SAK" and Visual Studio will automatically handle source control. See Alin Constantin's blog for details.
I haven't yet discovered the root of the other reason, but the project that is giving me trouble is also CppUnit 1.12.0! I'll keep digging and post my findings.
John
Have you put a .suo or .ncb file into source control perhaps?
Have you tried closing VS2005 after it checks out cppunit and then seeing if any changes were made?
I often encountered something like this with Web App solutions where the project file wasn't actually saved until you closed studio down and reopened it.
Just to clarify, I'm assuming that you mean Visual SourceSafe2005 is causing the problem, not Visual Studio. (FYI, Visual SourceSafe is usually abbreviated VSS.)
I've experienced this issue with VSS before. I think the limitation is really fundamental to Visual SourceSafe: it's just not that good of a product and I would move to something else if it's a decision you can influence.
If you can move to something else, I recommend Subversion for a small or medium-sized project. It's free, and does not use the pessimistic locking mechanism that Visual SourceSafe uses by default. There's an excellent Visual Studio add-on called VisualSVN that will give you the same functionality in the IDE (seeing what files have changed, etc.) that you get out of the box with VSS.
If you cannot change source control systems, I believe Visual SourceSafe has a mode called "non-exclusive checkouts" or something like that that uses the optimistic locking that Subversion and other source control systems use. Try setting that option at least for the files that are obviously not being changed and see if that resolves the issue.
I get this a lot when one of the projects in the the solution has source control information with path information that is not the same in source control as on your workstation. When VS opens the project it will automatically attempt to check out the project in question and
To fix it, you're best off having everyone who uses the project remove their local copies and do "get latest version..." to grab what is in your source control database.
you can also check the .sln file and look in the GlobalScxtion(SourceCodeControl) area for each project's information and see if the relative path is not how you have the projects stored on your workstation - though manually changing this file vs. doing a "Get Latest Version..." is much more likely to cause problems for the other developers who use the solution as well.
Your cppunit project is probably automatically creating one or more additional files when the project first loads, and then adding those files to the project. Or else one of the project's properties is being changed or incremented on load.
If you go ahead and check the project in, does it check itself out again next time you load it? Or does checking it in fix the problem for awhile?
Very often this sort of behavior is caused by VS trying to update source control bindings.
Graeme is correct, VS will not save project or solution files until you close VS.
I would let VS check the files out, then close VS, then diff them.