Develop Reference

Quick Actions and Refactorings not working in VS2015 Pro [duplicate]

My installation of Visual Studio was fine previously, but has started acting weird lately. Some of the symptoms include
Visual Studio randomly hangs or crashes
Visual Studio won't start
Intellisense disappears sometimes
Plugins are not working, or are failing to start
I can't install or uninstall tools
I can't connect to source control anymore
Certain known good project types fail to load properly
Known file types don't have syntax highlighting anymore
I can't add files to a solution because the option is greyed out
I can't add, remove, or update files to a solution due to an error
I can't add or remove projects to a solution due to an error
I can't open a solution due to an error
The debugger cannot launch, or attach to processes
I can't find any templates when I try to add a new item
I can't copy/paste due to an error
A DLL required by Visual Studio is missing or corrupt
Menus are suddenly empty
Something that I know should normally work, now does not work
How can I fix this?
(This question is meant to be a canonical close dupe for these types of questions)

Visual Studio is pretty reliable, and most of us using it aren't experiencing the issues you are. It's a pretty large and complex suite of components, though, which means problems are bound to occur.
First: Restart Visual Studio and, if that fails, restart your computer
The majority of small issues are fixed by restarting Visual Studio. Some of the ones involving connectivity or services can be fixed by restarting your computer.
If this doesn't fix your problem
There's no way to guarantee that something bad won't happen to a particular installation of Visual Studio. The ways a large, complex application can become misconfigured or damaged are too varied to mention.
The effort it would take to diagnose and track down every possible cause is great. Ain't nobody got time for that. The one reliable solution—which works almost every time it's tried—is:
Reinstall Visual Studio.
Go ahead, rest your eyes for a little bit. Come back when you've come to terms with this sad fact.
…
Resigned? Okay. We're going to go through the steps to fix your problem, starting with the lowest impact, but probably least likely to work, one first. While you are attempting to fix this, keep notes! Mentally, or write them down. If you get to the last step, you'll need them.
First, let's go the easiest route and return Visual Studio to its original state. We can do this by removing all extensions and by resetting all settings.
Open the "Extensions and Updates" dialog. If you can't find it, type that into the quick launch. If you can't find that, try ctrl-q. For each installed extension, highlight it and click the Uninstall button.
Next, let's reset those settings. Make sure you export them first!
From the docs:
To export your settings
1. On the menu bar, choose Tools, Import and Export Settings. Choose the Export selected environment settings option button, and then
choose the Next button.
2. Make sure that the check boxes for the kinds of settings that you want to export are selected and all other check boxes are cleared, and
then choose the Next button.
3. (Optional) Name your settings file, enter a different path where it should be saved, or both. By default, setting files are named
Currentsettings.vssettings and saved to %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual
Studio 2015\Settings.
4. Choose the Finish button.
You can import them later from the same location. Now, once you've saved your settings, go back and reset them.
Tools -> Import and Export Settings... -> Reset all settings
Having reset everything, try to repro your issue. Still breaking?
Heck.
There's no doubt that you need to reinstall. Let's go the easiest route and do a repair. Do the following:
Go to Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features
Select Microsoft Visual Studio [whatever edition] [whatever year]
Click "Change"
Click "Repair"
After you've done this, try to repro your issue. Did it still happen?
Damnit, sorry.
If you want to try a different way, you may be able to do an "overlay" reinstall. Simply run the installer directly and select "install" (if this option is available to you). You can use your original media, but I'd strongly suggest you re-download the installer. This will overlay a new version over the old, without messing up your settings. After reinstalling, try to repro. Did it?
Aw hell. Here we go.
You need to try uninstalling/reinstalling. First, though, you might want to export your settings. You should have done this for step one of this answer, but if you didn't, go back and follow the instructions to do it now.
After saving them, repeat steps 1 and 2 (from the repair instructions) and this time select "Uninstall" instead of "Change". If your issue has to do with an external component, search for it in the list of other installed applications and uninstall it as well. If you're paranoid, uninstall everything Visual Studio related. They may be out to destroy you.
Now, reinstall Visual Studio. If you've found yourself at this point, you're in deep, so don't risk installing from your original media. Download a fresh, fully updated copy from where you originally got it. For example, if you got Visual Studio via your MSDN subscription, go there and download the ISO.
Now, having reinstalled everything, try to repro. Did it happen again?
F##&ing s#!t.
Now is the time to create a bug report. Go to Connect
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/LoadSubmitFeedbackForm
Provide as much information as possible. You need to give them all the info they ask for in the form, plus details about the bug, how to repro it, and what you did to try and fix it. Remember those notes I told you to write down? Bust them out now. I'd strongly recommend you mark your issue public, as it may be found and commented on by others with your problem.
Within a day you'll get a response. They will probably want you to turn on Visual Studio logging and repro the issue. I won't tell you how to do this here, as they will give you exact instructions for the version of Visual Studio you are running. Follow them and reply as soon as you can.
There will be one of three outcomes from this process:
They will tell you that you're doing it wrong
They will discover an outside actor causing the issue
They will discover a bug
For #1, stop doing that, and you're done. For #2, they'll probably tell you to uninstall the bad actor (e.g., remove a plugin) and go tell the people responsible about the bug (don't slack--do it). For #3, they'll triage the bug and it will be fixed sometime later. It's likely they will suggest workarounds that will at least get you moving again, if it's a true bug.
And that's it. Now, go forth and reinstall Visual Studio!

Breakpoints not getting hit in Xamarin Studio

My breakpoints aren't getting hit in Xamarin Studio. I'm not sure if this has to do with my code, or not, but I feel as though it doesn't because I've tried over and over putting breakpoints all over my project (in places where I know they should definitely be hit, and in places that the code works perfectly and is completely unrelated to the feature I'm currently testing) and none of them are getting acknowledged when I debug. I don't have the breakpoints disabled, and I don't have them added in the wrong place. The breakpoints should work normally, and they're not. I'll also add that I'm not allowed to pause my application during the debugging process. I suppose you could say the debugger in my Xamarin Studio isn't working and I have no idea why. I believe I've determined it's unrelated to the code, but I can't be sure about that still. Please help. Thank you.

It is the most popular question about: "breakpoints are not being hit in xamarin" in google, so after whole day of trial and error I am gonna post here a solution for this problem for xamarin versions > 4.0.0.xxx. Yes, sadly this is simple.
SOLUTION
(This solution is for android app in visual studio, but should work in xamarin studio as well)
Remove all symbols from the path to your "Debug" Folder (usually: [path to your .sln file] \ [your solution name] \bin\Debug):
So if you got for example:
G:\My Files\Programming\C# (+ JS)\Test1\Examples\LINQ to Objects\AndroidDemo\AndroidDemo\bin\Debug
Change it to:
G:\My Files\Programming\CSharp\Test1\Examples\LINQ to Objects\AndroidDemo\AndroidDemo\bin\Debug
For me "(" and ")" symbols were causing the trouble (Who is using such symbols in the path anyway right?)
To verify that this is working, open your debug folder, in VIsual Studio Select "Clean Solution", "Recompile Solution", "Deploy".
"Deploy" action should generate *.mdb files which include your debugging data. If they are present, you should now be able to stop at breakpoints.
Now you can simply hit F5 like usual whenever you need to debug something.

I'm not sure if someone is still following this thread, but this workaround worked for me.
The problem sometimes has to do with the mono 5.
So the resolution is to use older version of mono:
Set "Project > Active Runtime" to "Mono 4.8.0 (8f6d0f6) (/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/4.8.0)".
for Mac users, change it in "Preferences" -> ".NET Runtimes"
Then Rebuild the Android app project.

Deleting the BIN folders and any *.SUO file is a favorite fix for this issue.
Can also try deleting any *.csproj.user
In worst case, reset VS Settings by launching (Run) with "Devenv.exe /ResetSettings"

Make sure you have your build configuration set to Debug.
Make sure your project's build settings are set to allow emitting DEBUG symbols for your Debug configuration.
Clean and Rebuild your solution/project.
Close and restart Xamarin Studio.
Reboot your computer.
Sometimes the build configurations for your solution can get complicated, and it's easy to miss something when building a complex build configuration. Make sure everything is setup properly in there.

I encountered this yesterday, using VS 2013 and Xamarin plugin. "All of a sudden" breakpoints in a PCL project were not active, even though breakpoints in an Android project still were. Everything had been working perfectly for weeks, and I had applied no updates. Looking at the VS Debug | Windows | Modules view, I could see that symbols were not loaded for the PCL assembly, and nothing I tried would force them to load, even though they were present in the folder with the running assemblies.
Then I remembered that the last thing I had done the prior day was not related to code, but was a bit of refactoring of csproj files to support a parameterized Jenkins build. I had placed an OutputPath definition in the first "shared" PropertyGroup, and removed it from all of the Configuration/Platform-specific PropertyGroups, e.g.:
<OutputPath>bin\$(Configuration)\</OutputPath>
I deleted this "common" OutputPath and put it back into each specific PropertyGroup (offending my DRY sensibilities, mind you), and things started working again.
This is probably not going to bite very many people, but it wasted a couple of my hours, so hopefully it spares someone else. The Xamarin build probably does some of its MSBuild/xbuild spelunking with strong expectations, so if you've modified your csproj files for a build process, this might be a possible culprit.

I add this answer because this is the only one that worked for me, in Project Properties > Build I wrongly checked Optimize Code.
Unchecking this box solved the issue.

I switched from stable to alpha Channel v.3.11.785 (Alpha). all breakpoints are now hit.

I faced this problem in Xamarin Forms app using Visual Studio for Mac. In my case, it was happened because of debugger. Visual studio was continuously showing "Waiting for the debugger to connect to the iOS simulator..." while running in an iOS simulator. I did reset the simulator (Hardware => Erase All Content and Settings) and cleaned up the solution. Then I could do the debugging with breakpoints. Hope this helps someone.

I had the same problem.
THE CAUSE (IMO):
In my case the problem is caused by Xamarin Studio (but with VS2013 is the same) build/rebuild process.
More in details, the *.mdb files are not correctly regenerated and therefore the debugger does not work properly.
You can check by doing a solution clean and going to bin/debug folder: if you still see *.mdf files then that's the problem in your case too!
SOLUTION
The only solution that works well is to manually delete all *.mdb files in bin/debug from all projects in your solution (so Android project and all PCL projects) and then do a Rebuild.
Let me know if this helps!

For me "(" and ")" symbols were also causing the trouble, I was searching for weeks for this problem. Remove the "(" and ")" in the full path, do a clean build and de breakpoints are hit again.

In my case, xamarin was not hitting any breakpoint. Red color rings were shown instead of filled red circles, because there were some syntax errors not able to be pointed out by xamarin, since I think solution build was not up to date, even I was able to run the app surprisingly. So I cleaned and build the solution, and it pointed out errors and relevant warnings after that. I fixed those, and ran the project. I was able to debug successfully after that!

If once the project launches on the device VS reverts to the standard editing mode (no debug options enabled in the menu) i.e. the debugger is not attached; check Project Properties > Android Options > Enable developer instrumentation is checked. For me the setting was disabled (most likely checked into source control after a release).

Use "Visual Studio for Mac" (Preview at the moment but works) instead of "Xamarin Studio". This fixed the problem for me. Breakpoints are working even in my PCL projects! Another thing... I had to change "project.json" (JSON format) to "packages.config" (XML format) when changing from "Xamarin Studio" to "Visual Studio for Mac".

Pressing F5 in Visual Studio 2010 Builds but does not Launch Application

I have a Click Once application (WPF) in C#. Initially when I would hit F5 to debug/launch the application it worked smoothly. Eventually, F5 only would build the solution and not launch the application (therefore I could not step through my code). For a short while I switched from Debug to Release mode and for some reason that allowed the application to launch after using F5 and I could step through my code again. But now that no longer works either. Long story short, I cannot get the application to run in a manner that allows me to step through the code. I can only do a Start without Debugging (Ctrl + F5). Obviously this doesn't do much for me other than tell me if the application works or not.

The thing that worked for me today was to open Task Manager and look for any debug programs that didn't terminate properly.
Task Manager > Processes > kill all programs "*.vshost.exe *32"

You probably have lost your start up project in the solution, or the start up project is messed up, and no correct "item" is defined for the startup.
Right click on one of your projects, and select : define as startup project.
Then retry that should do the trick. If not, check in that projects properties to see if a form or something is defined as the startup object for that project.
Edit : Obviously dont define a class library project as startup project, but choose your UI :).

I had this same issue today and came here looking for help. I tried all the suggestions here and nothing helped.
Seeing as my solution was a simple console application I recreated it from scratch. The new solution didn't exhibit the problems, so I started comparing the two.
I reset the solution and project files so that they were identical (apart from Project GUID, name and root namespace) but the first solution still didn't run.
I then tried deleting the suo files, and the bin and obj folders. Still the first solution wouldn't run.
Finally, I noticed the vshost.exe process was still running for the project. When I killed that and reloaded, it all started working correctly.

I just had this problem today. The solution turned out to be a slight twist on the issue with *.vshost.exe mentioned previously.
I could build the application just fine but msvs refused to launch it. I could manually launch the application and the time stamp on the file indicated that it was in fact a fresh build as well. *.vshost.exe wasn't showing up in the task manager, so I couldn't end the process as suggested.
When all else failed, I tried deleting the .exe's and found that *.vshost.exe would not delete because it was in use. The error message indicated that it was actually the steam client (third party software) that had somehow grabbed my *.vshost.exe file and was "using" it. Not sure how or why. At any rate, I completely shut down steam, then it let me delete *.vshost.exe. After that, building and running from msvc worked normally.

Had the same issue, eventually tried deleting all breakpoints and the debug started working again. Yet to figure out why, but at least it works.

As well as the ghost *.vshost.exe. It could also be that you have the same Solution/Project open in another version of VS. I had the same Solution open in both VS2010 and VS2015 and when running in VS2010 it compiled but failed to start. Closing the VS2015 Solution and it ran as expected.

After years of using VS 2008, I suddenly had the F5 problem not launching the application. There must be a dozen different suggestions out there - I tried a few. Someone suggested a virus. My Microsoft Security Essentials was not automatically updating (a common problem it seems), so I manually updated it. It found a virus, removed it, and the F5 problem went away !

Had this problem and tried to delete everything in bin/debug folder but could not delete vshost.exe file - kept requesting admin permission and then still could not remove it even though running from admin account. Restarted and file was gone and f5 worked again

Error Creating Debug Information - Code Won't Compile

I'm using VS 2008. When ever I make a change in my code and try to compile I get the following error:
Error 7 Unexpected error creating
debug information file 'C:\Documents
and Settings\jbezanson\My
Documents\MyProjects\DispatchBoard\DispatchBoard\obj\Debug\DispatchBoard.PDB'
-- 'C:\Documents and Settings\jbezanson\My
Documents\MyProjects\DispatchBoard\DispatchBoard\obj\Debug\DispatchBoard.pdb:
The process cannot access the file
because it is being used by another
process. ' DispatchBoard
Using Process Explorer, it is always devenv.exe that is locking the file. If I run in Release mode this does not happen. It started 2 days ago when I started a WPF application, and since then it happens with every application I work on.
The only info I could find from Google was referring to a bug in VS 2003.
Anyone else have this problem? How do I fix it? It is getting very annoying having to kill the file handle every time I want to compile.

If you have multiple instances of VS open, close other instances (apart from the one you are trying to compile) - this may resolve the issue.

When I have problems with locked files, I use Unlocker. (If you tried everything and it's not working, try this ;)
In case of broken link, here's a mirror.

Have you tried closing VS, deleting obj folder then restarting VS?

I had the same problem this morning and noticed that I had another project open that had a reference to the one that would not compile or debug. I removed the reference (as I didn't actually need it) and it was fine.

I changed the 'StartUp Project' of my solution to a project without reference to the locked file's project.
This solved the issue for me using VS 2010 SP1.
(Process Explorer said msvsmon.exe (started by devenv.exe) locked the pdb file.
After changing the startup project the processes msvsmon.exe and .vshost.exe disappeared and so did the file handle.)
Alex Clark, thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

The only thing that worked for me is to remove the optimizeCompilations="true" attribute from on the compilation element in my Web.Config file.
Compilation time may be a little longer, but it worked well.

To avoid that problem just open the project properties, go to Debug tab an untick "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process"

I had this issue today. In my case, I had just grabbed the data from my company's source control and instantly hit this issue when I tried to compile the project. The issue ended up being that the \bin folder was set to Read Only. To solve the issue, I just made the folder not Read Only.

I just came across the same problem today. And then I realized what went wrong: I had couple of Visual Studio windows opened at the same time, and one of them was in debug mode.
When I stopped debug mode in that one, the problem was solved.
That happens when you have a "fistfull of VS windows" opened.

Right Click The Folder that contains debug .pdb and uncheck the folders read-only propertys then ok. thats it.

This works for me with web projects in Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web:
Press F5 to begin debugging
"Do you want to execute last successful build?" - hit YES
At this point you could try a request - not sure if this step is necessary
Hit the stop button
Recompile successfully

I have solved a similar problem by adding these lines as a pre-build event:
if exist "$(TargetPath).locked" del "$(TargetPath).locked"
if exist "$(TargetPath)" move "$(TargetPath)" "$(TargetPath).locked"
With proper modifications, it might help your problem.

Since you say you have it on all applications you work on it sounds like a more global problem. You could try and reinit the vs2008 by writing
devenv.exe /setup
Edit: link to command line options

This worked for me. What I done was that close my visual studio and delete the .suo file and then re-open the solution. The locking should be disappeared now. Cheers.

Old topic, but something that worked for me. I had 2 projects in my solution, a class library type project and a windows form project. The windows form project was referencing the compiled binary and not the project itself in my case which was causing the lock. After changing the reference to the class library project, it worked properly.

Not need to restart or delete the file.Deleting will not be possible , you will get error message. Just rename the file and that is enough.
VS2010 will create another file for you as it wont find the origional. :)

I had the same issue from time to time. Usually no problem but once in a while... This particular time, it was impossible to work. I would shut the application down, and even that didn't work most of the time. I saw this post and a person said they had no issues until they started a WPF application. I was playing music (radio station) in the background with Windows 8 "Music" app. I had the idea that it was a Microsoft App built with Visual Studio. Once I stopped playing music, I never encountered the error. If you are reading this, see if you have any Microsoft apps running.

I also had the same issue. Tried all the suggestions above with no luck. I eventually change the Build Configuration from Debug to Release, the solution built...

This problem started occurring for me after changing from Cassini to IIS Express as my platform for debugging.
Cassini was much better than IIS Express but doesn't properly support the Integrated pipeline. IIS Express is hopeless.
This seems to be some sort of race condition in Visual Studio or IIS Express. It is nothing to do with one project locking another project - the locks are coming solely from the activity of the web application's build process.
Anyways, none of the above solutions worked for me. Unlocker doesn't seem to be supported for Windows 8 anymore. So instead I tried LockHunter. What I do is keep the LockHunter app open all day. If I get a complaint about some file being locked I copy and paste the file path into LockHunter then try again. This usually sorts out the problem but sometimes takes a few attempts.

Visual Studio 2008 crashes when opening solutions in a TortiseSVN directory? How do I fix this?

I'm using TortiseSVN for my subversion client on a Windows Server 2008 box and I've got a folder with code checked out into it.
When I go to open the solution file that's under source control Visual Studio 2008 starts and before it can even finish loading the solution from what I can tell Visual Studio crashes. I'm trying to open a solution that has VB code in it. It gives no error messages or warnings. It's just gone.
I have checked the files and they all seem fine. The solution file seems fine when I look at it with a text editor.
This is also Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and I've got all the latest .NET service packs installed.
Has anyone else seen this before and know how to fix it?
Edit: I just did an SVN export to a new directory and it still crashes in the exported directory where there is no longer any SVN attached to it.
Additionally, it crashes EVERY time I try to open the project that came from SVN.

You should be looking at the solution file with an xml editor, at least then you will get some help for subtile flaw's in the formatting or something like that.
You can also submit feedback to Microsoft on the VIsual Studio Connect site, if the bug turns out to be real.
Some commonsense things todo however would be, goto your visual studio command prompt, start off with "devenv /ResetSettings", that often helps isolate any weirdo add-on or something lke that.
Also, try to build clean with msbuild or vcbuild, then build fully with either one (i.e. if vcbuild can not build your solution, use msbuild). That can help by laying out the symbols and such and maybe clear out some corrupted file or something.
You also may have .suo files from your subversion, those are binary files that do contain some settings, it's common for people to accidentially check them in, but they are usually better off being kept on a per-developer basis (not in the source tree). The /resetsettings will likely clear these out also, but you may want to make sure.
You can also double check the path's to all of the assemblies referenced, that your not going from a 32/64 bit host, and the CLR DLL's are in different path's now etc...
One last thing, if your really stuck, you can get a stack trace and debug the crash a bit ;), see where the fault is occuring and search that module online, your'll often find that somebody may have a specific solution.
Oh yeah, also, hooker's can be trickey. Don't trust them for a minute. Make sure you set tsvn's "only load in windows exlporer" option and configure it specifically for what folders on your system have local-svn working directories, this will greatly reduce the working set for their shell extension. On most any system, over time, one program or another (apple irw.exe or adobe pdf-preloader.exe sort's of ad-ware) will try to work it's way into your shell. You should try to make sure your dev box is rather clean from anything hook's, simular to what VladV was saying...

I had a similar problem and I fixed it and afterwards I wasn't quite sure how I managed it.
It basically involved going to the tools/options menu and setting the source control plugin to none. However, I obviously had to have had the solution open in Visual Studio if doing this was to fix the solution, but yet I thought the problem was I could not open the solution.
The only possible scenario would be if I was able to open the solution, but not open any of the projects inside it, hence able to change the source control settings immediately after opening the solution.
Does that make sense?

Try opening your solution and projects files in a text editor, and looking for anything strange.
I once heard of a similar problem: a solution contained SVN bindings created by AnkhSVN, but Visual Studio had no AnkhSVN installed, and failed to open the solution without giving any meaningful error information.