14 June 2006 - 18:22Visual Studio Debugger Hang Fix

At work, I use Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 for development. If you set a breakpoint in your code and run the app, when the flow of execution reaches the breakpoint the application will be interrupted and the Visual Studio debugger will open up. At this point Visual Studio can become unresponsive for quite some time, in some cases up to a minute. Obviously, this can be a real pain when debugging code. The good news is the fix is quite easy.

What is happening is that Visual Studio is executing code to evaluate all of the properties in every class in the current project. If your project is quite large (and ours is), the delay can be quite noticable. You can easily turn off the automatic property resolving and then Visual Studio will immediately return to the debugger without hanging. When you check the properties attached to a given object you will need to click each one once to evaluate it (instantly). From then on that property will be shown as evaluated. This is a significant time saver since generally you don’t need to view every property in every object in the entire project.

To turn off the automatic property evaluation, navigate to the Tools menu then Options, select the Debugging/General section and uncheck “Enable property evaluation and other implicit function calls.”