How to automatically stop debugging when starting to edit code?

Question

I am working on an ASP.NET project. When I am debugging, I often want to switch back from my browser to Visual Studio (2008) and edit some code. Visual Studio then won't let me edit the code, unless I explicitly quit debugging first.

Is there any way to configure Visual Studio such that is automatically stops debugging and allow me to edit the code, or do I have to stop it manually each and every time?

Disabling Edit and Continue does allow me to edit the code, but this does not force VS to stop debugging...

Answer 1

Yes it can be done. By default this feature is off. To enable Edit and Continue go to Tools.. Options in the visual studio IDE menu. Open the Debug section of the tree and click on the Edit and Continue Group. Make sure “Enable Edit and Continue” is checked. If you are using the VS 2005 Professional you may need to click a checkbox at the bottom of this screen saying something like Show all Options.

UPDATE: You must be at a break point in your code to edit. You cannot edit method signatures, add new methods, etc. Changes like that were not what Edit and Continue were designed for and I can’t even start to think how that would be implemented by Microsoft.