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

My Visual Studio 2008 opened the solution file with no problem. However, when I was to add a new class, user control, aspx file or similar, I received the error:

Could not find part of "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\…\ItemTemplatesCache…"

[and the path to the ItemTemplatesCache in Visual Studio 2008 folder].

The solution

Well, one slution would be to reinstall or repair installation of Visual studio 2008. However, after searching for a while I found a solution that is much easier:

1. Open "Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt" as an Administrator
2. Run the command: "devenv /installvstemplates"
3. That's it

It takes a while but it completely rebuild your item template cache if it is corrupt or completely missing like me.