Visual Studio Express can't debug - "The debugger is not properly installed"

Question

I have recently set up Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition on my laptop (running XP SP3) to develop some c# .net code for a website. All seemed to be working great, I can edit code and the website runs in IIS...

The problem came when I hit F5 to debug. I get the following error message:

"Unable to attach to application 'WebDev.WebServer.EXE' (PID: 3520) using 'VITCH2000'. The debugger is not properly installed. Cannot debug the requested type of code. Run setup to install or repair the debugger"

I have googled the error message and spent hours trying various fixes but no joy. The debugger refuses to work. I also repaired the .net framework (2, 3 and 3.5) and uninstalled/ reinstalled/ repaired Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition but the same error remains.

I also re-registered the dlls in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VS7Debug and even deleted them all between uninstalling and re-installing but nothing seems to help.

Does anyone know which setup I am meant to run or a way to make this debugger work? Any ideas much appreciated!

Answer 1

This is just a shot in the dark, but you might try to install the Visual C# 2008 Express Edition and see if you can import your web project into that edition and debug it from there. Its been a while since I've worked with the Express editions, but I seem to recall using the Visual C# 2005 Express Edition to run web applications.

Answer 2

I seem to have a solution (of sorts). I decided to try using "Open Web Site > Local IIS" to open the website instead of "Open Web Site > Filesystem". The debugger now works!!! YAY! There is a downside to this though. There is a bunch of third party code linked in to the site as a virtual directory in IIS. The site now takes much longer to compile because it seems to compile (or at least error check) all of that code before launching the site. Is there a way around this.

Since the filesystem method was working correctly on my desktop computer I also decided to try checking out the site code to a different directory on my computer and using "Open Web Site > Filesystem" to open that new folder. Guess what? It also debugs correctly!! So it seems that there is something wrong with the settings for the specific project I created. And in all of the reinstalls of VS those user files haven't been replaced (even though at one point I deleted the entire "My Documents\Visual Studio 2008" directory.

Any ideas how I can delete all the user settings files for the initial project so that I can debug from the original filesystem location?