Can't start debugger in VS2012 RC

Question

Configuration:

• Windows 7, 64 bit
• Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2012 RC Version 11.0.50522.1 RCREL
• Running VS in administrator mode
• The VS solution contains a web application, with target: .NET Framework 4.

When I press F5, the solution builds... and nothing else happens.

• Happens with both IIS or the VS Dev Server.
• Happens with Platform Target of "Any CPU" or "x86"

If instead, I use the Debug / Attach to Process... menu, after a few seconds, I get:

• "Debugger is Busy" - Debugger is performing a remote operation that is taking longer than expected. This dialog stay until I click "Terminate" and confirm it.
• Then this dialog appears: "Microsoft Visual Studio" "Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor named [COMPUTER NAME]. The network connection to the Visual Studio Remote Debugger has been closed."
• After clicking OK, the 'normal' "Attach to Process" window finally shows up. In it, the list of "Available Processes" is empty.

Any suggestions or clues?

The main points that I wonder about:

• Why is the list of processes empty? It is not surprising that the debugger does not work if it cannot see any processes.
• Why is it trying to do "remote" debugging, when it is just accessing the local computer?

(Cross posted on social.msdn)

Answer 1

If you are opening a VS 2010 project with the new VS 2012 version it's probably your bin and obj folders that are causing the problem,deleting them solved the problem for me.Or you could clean your solution but I preferred manual deletion.

Answer 2

Ultimately, a Repair of the VS2012 resolved this issue for me. I followed the advice found at your social.msdn cross-post without any resolution (Devenv.exe /SafeMode /ResetSettings /ResetSkipPkgs and /Setup). Like you, my solution (VS 2010 SP1) also has a web application (targeting .NET 3.5), and the startup project is set to a winforms app. The ASP.NET development server did not start, nor did the app I was trying to debug.

Note that this issue was also posted to Connect at this link (by you?). If anyone else sees this issue, the Connect folks are requesting running the Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool to collect data. As I started the Repair process prior to finding the Connect issue, I did not and was not able to provide feedback to MS with logging.

Answer 3

I had the same issue - starting debugger just told me what a good job it had made of the build and the decided that that was enough.

I feared the worst, but luckily for me a reboot fixed the problem.

I know that this is therefore a pretty useless post in as far as offering help to anyone suffering with this issue, but I thought it was worth noting the point as it shows a) another person with the same problem so please fix it MS, and b) that sometimes a reboot fixes it so maybe that tells the maintainers something.

Answer 4

I have fixed the same issue by checking off the "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process" option from the start-up project Properties->Debug - Enable Debuggers options

Answer 5

Had this problem for a C++ application. Looking at the devenv.exe events in ProcMon pointed me to it trying to load a Visual Assist configuration file, which I had in my disk cleanup zeal accidentally deleted. Removing and then installing the extension again fixed it for me.

Answer 6

I've got a similar setup and I'd followed all the suggestions here and on Microsoft Connect - none of which worked for me. The only thing that did work was renaming MSVSMON.EXE in the x64 folder to MSVSMON.EXE.OLD and copying in the file from the x86 folder in it's place. I'm not sure if there are any other implications in doing this but it seems to have solved the problem in my case.