C Solutions Blog

   You got to love Microsoft program updates. They're like Russian roulette. Sometimes the gun goes off.

   That was my initial experience with Internet Explorer 8 and trying to debug a Visual Studio 2003 Web program.  All of a sudden, without warning, I was unable to have debugging working within the IDE.

   To take a step back, I begrudgingly updated my computer to Internet Explorer 8. This after weeks of Microsoft update telling me it's a, basically, mandatory update, in it's mind. I have this paranoid fear of things going wrong if I were to change something like that. Unfortunately, this time it did.

   After a search on the Internet I found some potential solutions, including registry changes, which I really didn't want to mess with. So I tried part of one  solution, and some error and trial, and found a relatively simple and easy solution, of sorts. 

    In reading on some websites about the problem, it appears IE 8 runs across multiple processes, which the Visual Studio editor is not expecting. It appears, herein lies the problem.

   Okay. Back to what you are probably looking for. Here is the 'solution' I have found.

   First, you need to uncheck the checkbox for "disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)". You get there from the 'Control Panel', 'Internet Options', then, 'Advanced' tab.

   Second, make sure you don't have any Internet Explorer 8 programs running. Basically make sure Internet Explorer is closed. Then, as normal, go ahead and run in debugging your web program. Note. I've only tested this with Visual Studio 2003 on an old project I am updating, but I hope, and expect, it works with the other Visual Studio editions as well.

   The good news is, given the two steps above, everything works fine and you can use Internet Explorer and the Visual Studio debugger to go through and work on your program.

   The bad news is, at first, when I later opened up Internet Explorer with the above mentioned checkbox unchecked, for some reason, the browser would  not go to my default page of Google. Or any other page.

   But, now, shortly later and mysteriously, it works fine when I open up a new browser and try to go to different web pages.

   I hope this article helps you. It was a pain to find out this problem and then have to hunt around for a solution. You would think Microsoft would do a better job of warning developers about this and give a decent workaround or fix for it. Oh well.

   Have a great day.