Upgrade to Visual Studio 2015 and now can't hit break points in debugging

Question

I have a multi-project solution that I was building in Visual Studio 2013 and it was working fine but now that I have upgraded to Visual Studio 2015 I can no longer hit break points in debug mode for any project exect the main project selected as the Startup project in the Project Properties page. I used to be able to click on the other projects and just choose Debug -> Start New Instance. I am getting the error The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document. I have tried a lot of things found on Google including:

• Clean/Rebuild
• Delete the OBJ and BIN folder form the projects
• Did VS repair
• Rebooted
• Uninstalled/Reinstalled
• Confirmed Define DEBUG constraint is enabled for Properties -> Build
• Confirmed Optimize Code is unchecked for Properties -> Build
• Confirmed Properties -> Build => Platform target was set to Any CPU for all projects
• Tried running VS using "Run as Administrator"
• Deleted all the files in /AppData/Local/Temp/Temporary ASP.Net Files/
• Made sure Debug -> Attack to Process -> Select had "Automatically determine the type of code to debug" was selected
• Made sure the Properties -> Web -> Debuggerts had ASP.Net checked (my properties has ASP.NEt and Enable Edit and Continue Checked, Natvie Code SQL Server and Silverlight unchecked)
• Confirmed Target framework in Properties -> Application was set to the same version (4.6) as in the Web.Config/App.Config files.

So what am I missing here? Why can I no longer debug the other projects?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem, when I created a new build configuration. After hunting around settings in VS2015, I noticed that there were no *.pdb files in my build output. Obviously, debugging would not work if there were *.pdb files.

The fix for me was to go into every project's properties -> 'build' page -> click the "advanced" button at the bottom of the page -> In the dialog's 'Output' section, I set "debug info" to equal "full".

Basically, I created a new solution and project and copied all the build properties into the solution that the debugger was not stopping at break points anymore. In addition to the setting above, I also changed the following setting to match the default debug settings:

• I set on the same advanced page "Internal Compiler Error Reporting" to "prompt"
• In the main 'build' page, I checked in the 'general' section "Define DEBUG constant" and "Define TRACE constant"