Visual Studio 2013 sp1 hangs when trying to debug ASP.NET web site?

Question

Recently, Visual Studio 2013 started hanging again when trying to debug/trace an ASP.NET web site. The site was created with WebMatrix 3 but I don't think that is relevant.

VS2013 opens the web site Solution. It takes a really long time to load up. Once it does load up and I run the project, it hits my first breakpoint and then the IDE Window quickly shows "(not responding)" in the title bar and the IDE is now hung.

This happened to me a long time ago and the root cause was needing to set the "use 64-bit IIS" option as indicated by this SO post:

Visual Studio 2013 crashes and restarts every time I run my test solution

But I triple-checked and I do have the 64-bit option checked. What can I do to fix this?

Answer 1

See this blog in the issue. It basiclly says to make sure "show all files" is selected in the solution and check for any folders that don't belong that are not part of your project/solution.

The problem resurfaced again a few days later and I finally figured out the problem with my uncooperative debugger. I have a folder containing approximately 20,000 images that are not included in the Visual Studio web project but are sitting in a directory in the web site. I had turned on "Show All Files" in Solution Explorer to add some script files into the project. When "Show All Files" is off, F5 (Start Debugging) works like champ. When "Show All Files" is on, Visual Studio becomes unresponsive. In reality it is not "frozen" but simply taking a very long time to process those 20,000 image files.

For me, it was a folder created called backup, which was a backup of the site (created by VS). I deleted the folder in question and the site loaded for debugging.

Answer 2

What worked for me was resetting visual studio. I got the suggestion from http://www.vosseburcht.com/?p=69

Answer 3

It might be caused be some extensions in Visual Studio, I was facing a similar problem when degbugging asp.net websites. Try running VS in Safemode: devenv.exe /Safemode. In my case it was caused by Multilingual App Toolkit extension, after uninstalling it, debugging ASP.NET websites works once again.

Answer 4

In my case, I was able to solve it by running it as an Administrator! Don't know why, couple of days back it was working fine, suddenly it started to freeze when trying to debub web app! Hope it helps someone!

BTW: I am running VS2013 Ultimate, with Update 4

Answer 5

In my case it's the IntelliTrace that causes problem. I need to disable it https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264948(v=vs.100).aspx

Answer 6

I have the same situation and "solved it" in a very particular way: Rebuild the solution and run it without debugging (Control + F5), then go back and debug it the normal way.

Answer 7

I was having a similar issue, and I found the following error in Windows Application Event Log that corresponded to the problem:

Application: PowerShellToolsProcessHost.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.Runtime.Serialization.InvalidDataContractException
...

So I removed PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio extension, and the issue went away. I am using Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Update 5.

Answer 8

I had this problem while writing an Excel add-in.

Not being a web app I was pretty sure that checking the 64 bit IIS Express option would make no difference, but it did!

I have no idea why, but it runs in debug ok now :)

Answer 9

I had to install Windows Management Framework 4.0

Answer 10

My solution was to remove all the .bak backup files generated by DevExpress ProjectConverter when I had upgraded to the new DevExpress version.