Visual Studio 2015 diagnostic tools no longer working

Question

I have Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition Update 3 running on Windows 7 SP1 64 bit, which I use to develop C# applications.

I love the diagnostic tools during debugging to spot performance problems early on. However, they stopped working for me sometime in the last month or so (possibly related to installing Update 3, although I have no information to back that up). I see the error message "CPU Profiling while debugging is not available on this version of Windows. To see CPU usage details, run the CPU Usage tool without the debugger (Debug -> Performance Profiler...)."

Things I have tried without success:

• Completely uninstalling and reinstalling VS.

• Performing a repair on my VS installation

• Ensuring "Use {Managed,Native} compatability mode" is disabled in debug options.

• Enabling the Diagnostics Hub logging info as described in this question. No error messages that I can see appear in the logs.

This still happens even if I create a new WPF project, so I don't believe it has any project-specific cause.

Are there any other things I can try? Obviously they were working before, so I don't believe the error message about my version of Windows being unsupported.

Answer 1

Deleting my solution's .suo (solution options) file fixed the issue. My initial statement of this bug affecting even new projects seems to be wrong. Although, I did do a complete reinstall of VS after doing that test, so it's possible that impacted the outcome.

Answer 2

Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft, specifically on the Diagnostic Tools team.

There are parts of the Diagnostic Tools that won't work on Windows 7, specifically taking a CPU profiling trace while debugging. This is a limitation of the operating system and ETW. If you are just interested in the graphs and debugging events, those should work. You can turn on logging for our tools which might give you some insight into why they are not working:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\DiagnosticsHub\LogLevel  
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\DiagnosticsHub\LogDirectory

For LogLevel you can use one of the following strings "All", "Info", "Debug", "Warning", "Error" (In your case I would use All to better see what is happening). As for LogDirectory it is a directory of your choice "C:\Logs". When your done reproing the scenario, close VS to flush the logs and don't forget to delete these keys as the diagnostic tools logging is pretty system intensive.

You should be able to search for "Error ---" in the logs to get an idea of what is happening. We have seen problems with certain VS extensions and custom projects.

Also, feel free to also post the issue at: https://connect.microsoft.com/ Each issue that is received there gets turned into a bug and assigned to the corresponding team.