I have a Windows Forms VB .NET application in Visual Studio 2008 on Vista targeting .NET 3.5 SP1. This application hosts WPF elements. I have been developing this application for some time and am now noticing a strange problem: when I hit F5 or click debug -> start debugging, VS will appear as if it is starting to debug (start is disabled, pause / stop / restart are enabled) and my windows will switch to their debugger orientation, but the application does not start up.

Normally I'd say I had something wrong with my debugger settings, but when stop and start the application or hit restart while debugging, it launches properly and runs fine. The debug settings are set to start the project as a start action.

Pausing the application in its unlaunching state shows no threads and no call stack.

Has anyone seen this before or have any ideas or workarounds?

---

- Matt Eland

Hello Matt,

How about changing the start action to Start external program? we could explicitly specify the start program in the textbox (and it will disable the Visual Studio hosting process).
Another workaround is start without debugging and then attach Visual Studio Debugger to our process.  Would you please have a try and tell me the result?

Best regards,

---

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.
If you have any feedback, please tell us.
Welcome to the All-In-One Code Framework!

Changing it to start an external application (using the program's output) resulted in a long delay before successful application launch. I wasn't terribly pleased with that so I did some more poking around and discovered I had ClickOnce security settings enabled. Since I'm not using ClickOnce for deployment, I unchecked that, switched back to start application debugging mode and it works fine now.

---

- Matt Eland

Hello Matt,

How about changing the start action to Start external program? we could explicitly specify the start program in the textbox (and it will disable the Visual Studio hosting process).
Another workaround is start without debugging and then attach Visual Studio Debugger to our process.  Would you please have a try and tell me the result?

Best regards,

---

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.
If you have any feedback, please tell us.
Welcome to the All-In-One Code Framework!

Changing it to start an external application (using the program's output) resulted in a long delay before successful application launch. I wasn't terribly pleased with that so I did some more poking around and discovered I had ClickOnce security settings enabled. Since I'm not using ClickOnce for deployment, I unchecked that, switched back to start application debugging mode and it works fine now.

---

- Matt Eland

 Glad to hear that and may you happy debugging!

Best regards,

---

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.
If you have any feedback, please tell us.
Welcome to the All-In-One Code Framework!