Develop Reference

Cannot launch applications outside of Visual Studio

I'm having a really strange problem that I just can't figure out. Things I compile in Visual Studio 2015 (C# projects in WinForms and WPF) will not launch outside of Visual Studio. This includes a project that is completely new and untouched. As in, create a new WPF Application, build in debug and release. Go to containing folders click on EXEs and...nothing.
When I run them I get 3 processes appearing in Task Manager (named the same as my application) than cannot be killed (through task manager or command prompt) and nothing else occurs. Nothing in event viewer that seems to correspond to the app. I've attached an instance of VS 2015 to the process and I get the following message: WpfApplication.exe has triggered a break point. Pressing Break takes me to a screen that tells me no debug information is available and pressing continue has no visible effects (I can occasionally see slight movement in the cpu % but not a lot else). Any attempt to stop debugging will cause visual studio to hang and when I end its process VS closes but its memory is not freed up according to Task Manager. All of these same things occur when building in VS2013 and attempting to run outside of VS. Everything runs just fine when run in debug mode inside Visual Studio but outside of it...not a chance.
I literally have no idea where to proceed from here. I can find no error messages or clues to point me in a direction to look. Is there something I'm missing/doing wrong? What steps can I take from here to find the source of the problem?
I've considered it may be something wrong with my computer but I want to explore the possibilities before I do something drastic like a clean install. If the prevailing opinion lies that way then I'll seek help elsewhere!
tl;dr: launching the exe of a compiled application results in no running application and no obvious error messages, how can I proceed from here?

I'm going to post an answer to this because I found out what was wrong but it probably isn't useful to have it hanging around so I'll just delete the question at some point soon.
The main lesson to remember is that the main purpose of anti virus software is to frustrate you as much as possible and if something weird is happening try turning it off briefly and see what happens. You'll probably find that things are now working correctly.
EDIT: I should restate this in a more serious fashion.
Anti virus can sometimes affect things in unexpected ways and turning it off temporarily can save you a lot of time. Keep it up to date too, mine was a version or so old and was not functioning correctly. I updated it and the deep scan now functions as expected rather than silently failing.

How do I Force suspension of Metro app

How do we force an app to Suspend (NOT shutdown, just suspend) and then force-resume it ourselves when we are NOT using visual studio/debugging?

When running under Visual Studio 2012, you can enable the Debug Location on the debugger toolbar. This will allow you to select one of the three operations, "suspend", "resume", and "suspend and shutdown".
[edited]
Sorry, just noticed that you are asking for non VS solution. You can suspend your app by dragging the app down. Move your cursor to the top of the page until you see a hand. Click and hold it and pull down to suspend your app. It takes a few seconds before the app actually enter suspend mode. If you want to do things sooner, you can use visibility change to toggle certain action first, like saving critical stuff.

.NET/C# debugging: How to debug a classical heisenbug?

Recently, I've run into a classical Heisenbug. Here's the situation:
I have a tree list, the master view, in one panel, and a detail view in another panel to the right, that displays information about the currently selected tree node. (Very similar to Windows Explorer.)
When I add a new node to tree (think of right-clicking a folder in Windows Explorer and saying "New -> Folder"), the newly created node gets selected.
And here's the bug: The detail view on the right should get updated to show the new node. However, it doesn't. I have to switch to another tree node once, before I can see information about the new node in the detail view.
The bug is easily reproducible and happens in both "Release" and "Debug" build configurations. But: As soon as I set a breakpoint in the event handler (for the "Add new node" menu entry) and enable it, everything works fine =>Heisenbug! I don't have to do any real debugging. Clicking "continue" after the breakpoint gets hit is enough.
For better understanding, I've made a video that should illustrate what's going on.
Everything I could think of to get rid of the issue was putting the thread (the application is single-threaded) to sleep for a few seconds, but that doesn't work.
I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions on what I could try to determine the cause of the issue. Or maybe someone has a guess about the cause?
I'm targeting the 3.5 framework and using x86 as solution platform. The tree list control is from DevExpress' WinForms controls; Visual Studio version is 2010.
Thanks
Update 3: Issue solved. The problem was that the call to the detail view's Focus() method didn't trigger the GotFocus event, which is crucial for updating the detail view. (I don't know why, probably it already had the focus.) However, the method did not fail, it simply did nothing.
Now I just focus another control before focussing the detail view and that's it. The reason why everything worked fine during debugging was that switching from Visual Studio back to my application correctly set the focus on the detail view.
A major obstacle in hunting down this issue was that setting a breakpoint in the GotFocus event handler is useless: anytime you try to switch back from Visual Studio to the app, the GotFocus event gets re-triggered, and you're stuck in an endless loop. Comments on how that could be worked around are welcome.
Anyway, my specific problem is solved.
Thank you very much to everybody who answered or commented. It helped me a lot.
Update 2: In my code, I select the newly created node in the tree. This triggers a FocusedNodeChangedEvent. In the corresponding event handler, I update the detail view and call its Focus() method.
It seems as if that fails when there's no breakpoint set. I think what triggers the correct update during debugging is that the detail view automatically gets the focus.
Window messages
Update 1: Here are the window messages that Eddy's answer provided. (Long list of messages deleted)

First time I've seen a video to support an SO :)
I'm thinking that the right-hand pane, or control group, need(s) to have Invalidate() called - which I think the breakpoint is triggering because it switches to VS, overdrawing the window. Then, when you switch back again, it forces everything to redraw, thus making it work.

When you have a "heisenbug" you need to see what is going on but with a lighter touch that doesn't interrupt the flow of the program.
I would suggest that you form an hypothesis about where your problem lies. I would then edit the code to include calls to the various methods of the Debug class, that test the hypothesis or just give runtime information for diagnosis. Then run your code in debug mode and see what you get in the output.
If you have a more elusive "hiesenbug" theat occurs only in release mode you would need to roll you own logging mechanism to gather your evidence.

Put a System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break() in the update routine for the other window. Then when the bug appears, a run time break point will be fired and you can view the stack.

It seems that the problem has to do with not getting the right event called to trigger and update to the child panel. When hitting the breakpoint your app loses focus and when you return it gains it again (which is a difference from running it). In order to inspect what events are and aren't called and what the difference is between the two scenario's add the following code to your form to see all the window messages that appear.
protected override void WndProc(ref Message winmsg)
{
base.WndProc(ref winmsg);
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(winmsg.Msg + " - " + winmsg);
}
Comparing the differences might help you in determining a way how to workaround this problem.

WPF: program.exe doesn't exit "the process cannot access the file.. used by another process"

I've worked on quite a few WPF solutions, and this is the first time i am seeing this problem.
Today it started happening intermittently. where after closing my WPF window, the .exe is still running under visual studio.
so i have to kill my program.exe manually in order to compile again.
Initially i thought because i overrode application start/exit/exception .. but i commented all that out, and it is still happening.
In fact, i see multiple instances of my program.exe in process explorer!
Can't figure out what is causing my exe not to exit. Is there any explicit dipose logic i can add in applicaton exit event to ensure it really exits?
My application consists of single window, and multiple user controls as views.
update
if i open in debug mode. and close the main WPF window, my visual studio does not stop debugging. however call stack window is empty.

You can use the Application.Exit event to log when your application shuts down.
Alternatively, you can attach the debugger to your running instance (even if it wasn't started in the debugger) then pause it to see where it's at. Make sure to look at the Threads tool window, as you may pause outside the UI thread.

This should take care of it, though its probably better to try to figure out the underlying issue.
System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().Kill();

How can I speed up the opening of a WPF window in a VS add-in?

I have a Visual Studio add-in which opens a modal WPF window.
My problem is that the first time round, it takes 4 seconds for the window to appear which is a clear disservice to the client. So I'm wondering if there is a way to optimize this away?
Is there some kind of nifty code to preload the PresentationFramework (or whatever is slowing the thing down) when the add-in starts, rather than when it is actually used?

You may want to check your output window in VS to see if the pause is actually from loading DLL's that it didn't have already loaded. If that's the case, then you can try this:
When the application starts, load a blank hidden WPF window and close it.
This should "pre-load" the presentation framework (if that's actually the problem - its sometimes hard to tell with these cases.), so that when you call the needed window its ready to open.
Not the best solution, but users can usually wait 4 seconds in the first place.