Visual Studio not debugging

Question

When I press F5, my web application starts up and runs, but the Visual Studio debugger is not attached to the process. The play button is always enabled.

I checked the configuration manager and all the libraries and web applications are debug|any-cpu.

Solution 1

You can also run your web application outside of Visual Studio, then select Debug->"Attach to process". In the process list, choose the ASP.NET working process, "asp_wp.exe".

Solution 2

Have you set

<compilation debug="true"/>

In your web.config file?

Solution 3

Oh how I hate this answer, but it has just worked for me...

Symptoms: it works fine for weeks, then simply refuses to debug.

Solution: close Visual Studio, delete the contents of the Bin directory, reboot.

Irritatingly it required a full reboot to get it to start debugging; restarting Visual Studio + iisreset wasn't enough.

More info: I sometimes find that IE's cache is the culprit (strange but true). Therefore close all instances of IE, start IE, clear the cache, close IE, then try debugging with Visual Studio again.