Breakpoints not working in Visual Studio 2008

Question

When I hit F5, my VS 2008 opens my site in IE and halts. There is no sign in VS that the project is running. It enables the RUN button again even though the site is opened in IE. Hence, my breakpoints are also not working.

This behaviour started happening suddenly..

Any reasons why it happens and resolutions?

Answer 1

This could be because your debug symbols get out of sync or can't be found. I would try these steps in the order listed below.

1. Save your solution, then close it and reopen it then try again.

2. Try the classic reboot of your machine

3. Create a test blank solution with a simple form and try placing a breakpoint in that. If other solutions work fine then create a blank solution file and move all your exisiting files in to there (A pain I know!)

4. Uninstall all of .NET Framework, Visual Studion 2008. This is the extreme case where anything you try fails, and you cannot get breakpoints to work at all in any of your projects. (Worst Case Scenario)

There are probably patches you might be able to apply, as well as checking your projects settings and IE settings.

Good luck.

Answer 2

Are you building in Debug mode? Release builds don't support breakpoints...

Answer 3

One reason I have personally experienced:

• Problem:
  Running two separate Solutions in their own instance of Visual Studio 2008

• Solution:
  I closed both instances of VS, then started only one.

• Conclusion 1: Visual Studio might have a problem when RAM is limited and silently disable breakpoints (fail)

• Conclusion 2: Visual Studio might share some critical resources needed for breakpointing which the first instance holds onto and (again silently) the other instance won't even give you an error.

Lots of bugs and fail in Visual Studio.