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 debu

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with Visual Studio 2015 Pro Update 3 running on Windows 10 Home. The runtime display of memory and cpu usage stopped working. Deleting the .suo file fixed the problem, as indicated by proc-self-map's answer. The .suo file was buried in the .vs hidden directory so I removed the whole .vs subdirectory. Now the runtime display of memory and cpu usage works like a charm again. No reinstall required.

Answer 2

I had the same issue, although deleting the .suo file did not help, I also repaired Visual Studio 2015 Professional and then it worked. So for future readers, if deleting the .suo does not help, try to also repair Visual Studio and vice versa.

Answer 3

I faced this problem today and it was not easy to find working solution. This helped to me: Reinstall Cumulative Servicing Release for Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 (KB3165756) Direct link to download: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=816878. After Repair action (I had it installed before, otherwise install) prompted to restart computer, did it and Diagnostic tools worked again.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

None of the others worked for me. What I had to do was close all Visual Studios and re-opened it and the diagnostic tool worked.

(I deleted the .suo file, made sure all the correct options were enabled, but because I had another Visual Studios session running, none of it worked until I closed all)

Answer 6

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.