Visual Studio 2013 sp1 hangs when trying to debug

Question

Recently, Visual Studio 2013 started hanging again when trying to debug/trace an ASP.NET web site. The site was created with WebMatrix 3 but I don't think that is relevant.

VS2013 opens the web site Solution. It takes a really long time to load up. Once it does load up and I run the project, it hits my first breakpoint and then the IDE Window quickly shows "(not responding)" in the title bar and the IDE is now hung.

This happened to me a long time ago and the root cause was needing to set the "use 64-bit IIS" option as indicated by this SO post:

Visual Studio 2013 crashes and restarts every time I run my test solution

But I triple-checked and I do have the 64-bit option checked. What can I do to fix this?

Answer 1

It might be caused be some extensions in Visual Studio, I was facing a similar problem when degbugging asp.net websites. Try running VS in Safemode: devenv.exe /Safemode. In my case it was caused by Multilingual App Toolkit extension, after uninstalling it, debugging ASP.NET websites works once again.

Answer 2

I had to install Windows Management Framework 4.0

Answer 3

See this blog in the issue. It basiclly says to make sure "show all files" is selected in the solution and check for any folders that don't belong that are not part of your project/solution.

The problem resurfaced again a few days later and I finally figured out the problem with my uncooperative debugger. I have a folder containing approximately 20,000 images that are not included in the Visual Studio web project but are sitting in a directory in the web site. I had turned on "Show All Files" in Solution Explorer to add some script files into the project. When "Show All Files" is off, F5 (Start Debugging) works like champ. When "Show All Files" is on, Visual Studio becomes unresponsive. In reality it is not "frozen" but simply taking a very long time to process those 20,000 image files.

For me, it was a folder created called backup, which was a backup of the site (created by VS). I deleted the folder in question and the site loaded for debugging.

Answer 4

I was having a similar issue, and I found the following error in Windows Application Event Log that corresponded to the problem:

Application: PowerShellToolsProcessHost.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.Runtime.Serialization.InvalidDataContractException
...

So I removed PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio extension, and the issue went away. I am using Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Update 5.