Visual Studio 2015 Errors in watches and no value pop-up when I hover over variable. BC32208

Question

I'm having difficulties with serveral of my VB.Net projects that I have upgraded to Visual Studio 2015. These projects have be upgraded over many years from visual studio 2003 to 2005 to 2010 to 2012. The code will compile and run without error. Debug.Print statements correctly write values to the immediate window. However, if I enable a breakpoint and try to look at any value in the watch window then I get an error like this one, reported in the watch window's value column:

error BC32208: Project already has a reference to assembly 'projectname.resources'. A second reference to 'projectname.resources.dll' cannot be added.

Similarly, if I break into the code and hover the mouse over a variable name then I do not get a pop-up containing the variable's current value.

My projects without resources have upgraded without any problems.

Has anyone met this problem? Has the way that resources are stored in a project changed in 2015?

Answer 1

FYI, I've just committed a fix for this that will ship in VS 2015 Update 2 (see https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/commit/e683a8438d42d92a3d142ba53f38b33315c7dea2).

Another possible work-around for this issue in the meantime is to strong name sign your app (and the satellite assemblies). The debugger was correctly ignoring the multiple resource dlls in the strong name case but not in the "weak" name case.