Visual Studio 2010 debug not starting, F5 or click on “Play” not working, not doing anything. Waiting 2-3 minutes solves the issue

Question

I have a relatively simple C# (Framework 4) console application. When I click the \"Play\" icon or hit F5 (i.e. start the program in debug mode), the icon becomes gra

Answer 1

See what happens if you try "Release" instead of "Debug". If release works, then its because of a process (that you can find in Task Manager) which name is {Name of your Project}.vshost.exe
It's description is "vshost32" so you can sort by description alphabetically to find it easies.

Answer 2

I had a problem like this. I was having problems using "run" when the network was involved.

I moved all of the files related to the program/solution to my local hard-drive (C:); they were on a network drive. Be sure to check the "References" (Look under the "Project" pull-down for the properties; then look for "References").

I would make sure all references are on you local hard-drive and set the "Path" correctly (to the reference on you local hard-drive) in the References tab. This seemed to fix the issue.

Answer 3

Enabling the Application Experience Service will do, i'm new to VB and encountered that one.

Answer 4

It can also happen if an another application is attached to the debug process. Once, I attached ants memory profiler to the visual studio(VS2012) debug process. Later, I stopped the debugging and try to run it again, but VS2012 didn't allow me to debug. Only after stopping the ants profiler session, I was able to debug again.

Answer 5

Apparently there are many root causes for this. In my case - opened an old application for the first time in VS2010. The solution was upgraded. Everything compiles without error - but app won't start. There are half a dozen class libraries linked to the application. Turns out one of them was still compiling to .Net Framework 3.5, whereas all the others had automatically upgraded to .Net Framework 4. Likely there was an error message in the conversion log, whose import I didn't heed at the time. Once I changed that last library to use 4 instead of 3.5, everything ran smoothly.

Answer 6

I my case, it's due to the use of a vshost. I don't clearly understand yet why. It's possibly due to the running platform (a Win7 x64 where I am not - and may not be - administrator) combined with other factors

But I can debug (using F5) if I disable the use of vshost via the "Project Properties > Debug tab > "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process".