Visual Studio 2008 debugging and breakpoints

My development tools are currently Visual Studio 2008, Resharper 4.5, Gallio and Testdriven.NET. But for as long as I have used these tools, my Visual Studio debugger has only worked partly.

The problem

When I inserted some breakpoints in my code, the first one was almost all the time hit. However, when I tried to step through the code, it worked fine for a bout 3-6 steps. But then Visual Studio debugger decided that was enough, and just completed the code.

The good thing was, it forced me to write many unit test cases, but sometimes I really think it is nice to visually see the state of your objects, in the code.

I have spoken to colleagues, and tested with different combinations of Gallio, Testdriven.NET and Re-sharper enabled, as I thought they cased the problem. But the debugger just kept bugging me. I had actually given up finding a solution to this problem, thinking that Visual Studio 2010 would fix it.

The solution

So finally, in a complete other context, I stumbled upon this page:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB957912

And thought…. that title sounds interesting… I quickly moved to the KB article, and started to read. I thought, that sounds exactly as my problem.

With nothing to loose I installed the update, and started to test the debugger… until now it seems to work :)

- please note, I do not use the debugger that often as I write very reliable code :)

About Mikkel Ovesen

I am a .NET developer, primarily developing apps for the web. I have been working with the web since 1997. I like open-source software and burgers ;)
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2 Responses to Visual Studio 2008 debugging and breakpoints

  1. We struggled with the same issue on my dev project with the same resolution (after pulling out a fair amount of hair). You can rule out Gallio and TestDriven.NET, we don’t use those and still had the issue.

  2. I am glad to hear you solved it as well. I had been coding for 6 months without debugging… it is very nice to have that functionality back :)

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