The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document in a Silverlight application

Question

Ok, what I have:

Visual Studio 2010 RC, W7 x64, started a new project type of Silverlight application. Hosting the Silverlight application in a ASP.NET Web Application Project. Silverlight Version 3.0. Added a LinqToSQL Class, a WCF Service, a Winform Tester Application (Project in the Solution) and a few Classes (also as Projects in the Solution).

Yesterday, suddenly I got the 'The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.' message to appear in the IDE, but it only affects the Web Appliaction, I can debug the Silverlight and the Winform App.

What I tried / did to get rid of the message:

• Reset Visual Studio Settings
• removed all files in every \Temporary ASP.NET Files Folder (there is one for each 32bit/64bit and for Framework 2.0 and 4.0)
• tried to debug using Visual Studio Integrated Web server - normally I use IIS, in the project output of the solution I deleted every obj and bin folders in every project folder
• created a new solution and added all the projects to this new solution
• deleted the solution suo file
• created a new ASP.NET Web Application to test if it is a VS-installation issue => I can debug this new project/solution
• rebooted the machine several times
• repaired the vs.net installation
• did an IISReset
• removed the Web App from IIS
• used the Create Virtual Directory Button under Project Properties of the Web App to create a new Web App in IIS
• changed the Framework Version of every project from 3.5 to 4.0
• Opened the Solution on my second machine => same behavior
• crawled Microsoft Connect for bugs / similar issues
• SPENT 7 HOURS.

So, this happens the 2nd time in my life. last time I solved it by deleting Temporary ASP.NET Files Folder, but this time I need your help.

Solution 1

Right click on solution --> Properties

Look under Common Properties --> Startup Project

Select multiple startup projects

select Start action on the projects you need to debug.

Solution 2

I had the same issue and after googling I found two typical solutions for this:

1. Make sure the Silverlight debugger is activated in the .Web project. Open up the project properties and select the Silverlight debugger under the "Web" tab.

2. Restart Visual Studio and delete all bin and obj folders.

But none of these worked for me. Then someone mentioned far down a thread to try using IE as the browser instead. This made debugging and breakpoints work again!

Edit:

Later I have struggled with IE9 not working, because it attaches to the wrong process. Instead of manually attaching to the correct IE process every time, I found a neat trick:

• Right-click one of the generated pages in the .Web project (.html or .aspx)
• Click "Browse with..."
• Set IE as default browser (will only affect Visual Studio's choice of browser)

Now, Visual Studio will launch IE when running the .Web project and attach to the correct process. That should do it.

Solution 3

Whenever I've had this particular error come up, it's turned out that the folder that Visual Studio is loading assemblies from is different from the folder the web-application is running from.

That is, the application server is running the application from

C:\dev\MyApplication\bin 

but Visual studio is debugging from

C:\dev\MyOtherApplication\bin (or something along those lines, anyway).

Note - for various reasons, I do my debugging with IIS as the application host instead of the dinky standalone gizmo that most people use. This could influence the usefulness of my answer!

Update:

For IIS the application server directory (i.e. C:\dev\MyApplication above) is the physical directory configured for the web application - this can be controlled by changing basic settings for the app.

For Visual studio the debugging directory (i.e. C:\dev\MyOtherApplication above) is the directory in which your svc files are found, usually the same directory as your csproj project file.

Solution 4

The problem for me turned out to be that the Properties->Build->Optimize code checkbox had been turned on in the Debug configuration. Turned it off, rebuilt, and debugging worked as normal.

Solution 5

The reason for what you faced is that the PDBs ("PDB stands for Program Database, a proprietary file format (developed by Microsoft) for storing debugging information about a program) are not up-to-date, this may be due to some reasons:

1- As Bevan said, you may be debugging another application!

2- You are debugging another version of the same application. For example, you attached a previously built application with the current version of the code for debugging without (re)building it.

Cleaning or Rebuilding the Solution solves such problems for me.

To make sure the problem is not yours, try debugging the same application with VS 2008 (I am afraid it may be a bug in VS 2010 -- it is still beta!).

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