VS2008 SP1: Pressing F5 takes ages to start website

Question

I have a Silverlight project (with ASP.net MVC web project)

Suddenly, when I press F5 it takes like 20 seconds, from the moment that Internet explorer opens, to when the debugger is attached. Mind you, it is a project that works perfectly since about 3 months. The problem just started last days.

When I start without debugging, everything runs just fine.

Any pointers on how to solve this?

edit: When I look at the output window, all it does is loading all the different assemblies, but one at a time at a painfully slow pace...

Also note that other project seem to start normally, even when debugging.

Answer 1

I have seen random slowness as well when trying to run web applications using "F5". I think a lot of it is due to the client side debugging features in VS2008 which seem to take some time to load. Did you recently add any large javascript libraries to your project?

Most of us just start the web app without debugging then attach the debugger to the worker process if needed. Since most of the time we don't need the debugger functionality. If we need client-side debugging we use firebug or the IE dev toolbar.

Answer 2

I had the same issue a few months ago I surfed around for hours, finding different solutions and finally the solution was really trivial - just click Debug -> Delete all breakpoints. For me it was weird, as I didn't have any breakpoints I knew of... but it worked... I had removed them by hand but after selecting Delete all breakpoints from the menu it started to work ok again...

Hope it helps... because this is the most annoying problem I have ever had with VS :)

Answer 3

I have seen a slowdown issue if (as many companies do) your My Documents directory is mapped to a network drive. Visual Studio stores several settings here which may slightly increase latency when debugging. Change this back to a local drive and you may see an improvement which may also extend to other apps.