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Quick tip: Super slow Silverlight debugging? Check your Internet Explorer (IE) add-ons.


I’ve been having problems debugging my Silverlight applications lately.  Everything ran fine as long as I didn’t hit a breakpoint but — WHOA NELLIE! — as soon as I did, I’d have to wait 10+ seconds before I could do anything.  And by “anything” I mean, *ANYTHING* on the computer.  I couldn’t change windows.  I couldn’t stop debugging.  I couldn’t open Task Manager to see what was eating my computer.  Nothing.  Because I of this, I got really good at not using the debugger very much (I think this is a good skill, BTW.)  Well, you can’t avoid the debugger all the time and recently my Silverlight debugging problems went from horrible to excruciating. 

The Symptoms: Super slow debugging of Silverlight in Visual Studio.  Break points get hit and it takes 10’s of seconds for Visual Studio to become usable. 

The Problem: One or more Internet Explorer (IE) Add-on.

The Solution: Experimentally disable/enable individual IE Add-ons in order to figure out which one is causing the problem. 

Step 1: Open Internet Explorer
Step 2: Press the ALT key to bring up the main menu
Step 3: Go to the Tools menu and choose Manage Add-ons

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Step 4: On the Manage Add-ons dialog, choose the add-on that you suspect is causing the problem, and click the Disable button and then click the Close button

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Step 5: Try debugging a Silverlight application with breakpoints. 
Step 6: If debugging performance doesn’t improve, re-enable the breakpoint from Step 4 and repeat the disable process for a different add-on.

Hopefully, this solves your problem.

-Ben

 

— Looking for help with your Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application architecture?  Has testing your Silverlight application got you down?  Drop us a line at info@benday.com.

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One response to “Quick tip: Super slow Silverlight debugging? Check your Internet Explorer (IE) add-ons.”

  1. Morgan Avatar
    Morgan

    Thanks, this just saved my day! After a load of time trying to debug this and generally getting frustrated I found your post and voila, I’m working again.

    Thanks for spending the time to blog this.

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