Disabling script debugging in VS 2008 + IE8

Visual Studio 2008 shipped with a feature to automatically enable script debugging when starting IE8 from Visual Studio. In other words, if you are using VS 2008 and IE8, there is no longer a need to tweak IE options to debug your site.

However, this feature unfortunately created a problem which we didn't notice before VS 2008 shipped - web sites which create a large number of dynamic documents can perform quite poorly under the debugger, and now there is no option to run your site outside the debugger. If you open solution explorer and see the document list under 'Script Documents' dance up and down, you are running into this problem.

1. This work around requires the Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to be installed. So if you don't have these tools installed, you can download them from Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C22D6A7B-546F-4407-8EF6-D60C8EE221ED&displaylang=en). If this is not an option for you, there is some alternative work arounds at the bottom of this blog post.
2. Right click on your project and open up project properties
3. Go to the 'Start Options' sheet, and click the 'Silverlight' button at the bottom of the screen. Because the debugger cannot debug both Silverlight code and Script code at the same time, this will disable Script debugging and therefore avoid the problem.

If you want to disable script debugging, I would love to hear about your scenario. We are aware of the performance issues with applications that create many documents. We hope to address this in a future version of Visual Studio.

• Open a new command prompt (start->run, cmd.exe). If you are on a 64-bit computer this needs to be a 32-bit prompt (start->run, c:\windows\syswow64\cmd.exe)
• reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\AD7Metrics\Engine\{F200A7E7-DEA5-11D0-B854-00A0244A1DE2} /v ProgramProvider /d {4FF9DEF4-8922-4D02-9379-3FFA64D1D639} /f

If you are using Visual Web Developer Express, replace 'VisualStudio' with 'VWDExpress':

• reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VWDExpress\9.0\AD7Metrics\Engine\{F200A7E7-DEA5-11D0-B854-00A0244A1DE2} /v ProgramProvider /d {4FF9DEF4-8922-4D02-9379-3FFA64D1D639} /f

If you want to restore your computer so that you can debug scripts again:

• reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\AD7Metrics\Engine\{F200A7E7-DEA5-11D0-B854-00A0244A1DE2} /v ProgramProvider /d {170EC3FC-4E80-40AB-A85A-55900C7C70DE} /f

Some sites run into problems being debugged due to numerous "anonymous code" nodes in solution explorer. For these sites, instead of disabling script debugging completely, it's possible to disable just the 'anonymous code' nodes. This requires Visual Studio 2008 SP1. To do so:

• reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Debugger /v HideAnonymousScriptCodeNodes /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2009
  PingBack from http://www.anith.com/?p=26929

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2009
  Visual Studio 2008, Internet Explorer 8 e il debug degli script

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2009
  Quando si esegue un sito Web da Visual Studio 2008, se esso viene visualizzato all'interno del browser

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2009
  Thank you! I've logged issues on the connect site for VS about this issue and was given the anonymous node work around that helped, but not nearly enough. The silverlight install fixed my problem completely! Its rare that I debug scripts, and the silverlight workaround gives me an easy option to turn script debugging on and off at will.

• Anonymous
  April 16, 2009
  Thanks for this post. Though I wasn't able to get the anonymous code fix to take with VS2008 SP1, disabling script debugging completely worked like a charm. Since this is effectively the scenerio I was dealing with in IE7 I'm happy. Thanks a bunch.

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2009
  This has speeded up development. Thanks.

• Anonymous
  April 22, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2009
  Thanks for the workaround! It helped me a lot!