Visual Studio 2015 call stack displays <Unknown function>

Question

Recently after doing a clean install of Windows 10 Pro on my computer, I noticed that whenever I break my program and open the call stack, the call stack shows the application name and line numbers, but the function name is displayed as <Unknown function>. The call stack can be navigated as usual, but the missing function names are very annoying.

I've tried the following:

• Made sure that I'm running a debug build with full symbol generation
• Confirmed that all relevant debug symbols are loaded
• Tried completely reinstalling Visual Studio (3 times)
• Resetting all my Visual Studio settings to the defaults
• Deleting/cleaning build and user-specific files
• Making sure my Visual Studio is up-to-date (Version 14.0.25123.00 Update 2)

Even creating a new Win32 C++ console application from the default template and breaking on the return 0; nets <Unknown function>'s in the call stack.

Example:
.

How would I make the call stack display the correct function names?

Answer 1

This error message means the component of the debugger which formats the text for C++ stack frames is failing. I've seen this happen when the installer leaves Visual Studio with mismatching binaries. Here are things I would try:

1. First make sure this isn't being caused by a faulty extension by running VS in safe mode via devenv.exe /safemode see Visual Studio Command Line Switches.

2. Uninstall any VS extensions, then uninstall VS and make sure all files are deleted from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Packages\Debugger (may need to change the path if you installed VS somewhere else), then try reinstalling.

3. If that doesn't fix it, then you may have a problem with your Windows install. You can try running depends.exe on cppdebug.dll and see if you can determine which dependency is missing.