Visual Studio 2010 remote debugging: Debugging symbols are not loaded for this document

Question

This is a weird problem, which luckily (?) also happens on other machines.

I've never had problems with debugging, and now I have: it shows an exclamation mark at my breakpoints which says :'The debugging symbols are not loaded for this document'.

The difference with other projects is that I run this web application in IIS:

• I've created a new website in IIS 7.5 (win7), listening on port 80 to local.comparer.nl
• I've added the url local.comparer.nl to my hosts file, redirecting it to 127.0.0.1
• I've edited the start page of the project (asp.net 3.5) to local.comparer.nl in 'use local IIS webserver'

When I start the site, it first says 'unable to start remote debugging'. I don't know why it looks for remote debugging, but when I started the remote debugging monitor, it still didn't work.

When I unloaded the debugging monitor, it didn't complain about the remote debugging anymore, but the exclamation mark still was there.

Solutions which -sometimes- help at my colleagues pc's:

• Delete everything from the \bin directory and rebuild
• Rebuild again (n number of times)
• Choose 'clean solution'

Any idea?

Answer 1

Are you building full debugging symbols? If not then the debugger has no information to relate the source code to the in memory activity under the debugger. This is set in the project properties per configuration.

Also ensure the symbols are in the bin folder.

You can validate that VS is loading the right symbols with the Debug | Modules window.