[RESOLVED] Editing a web app in VS2013 while debugging

[InvisibleDuncan]

I'm building an MVC 4 website in VS2013, following a Pluralsight course for a bit of a refresher. On the course's video, the instructor is able to keep his website running in the browser (IE) while he makes changes to the code, then rebuilds the code and refreshes the browser to pick up his changes.

I'm not able to do that. If I press "Stop" in the debugger (which is what he does), it closes the browser. If I press "Pause", it leaves the browser open and allows me to make changes, but when I then try to build or restart, it prompts me to stop debugging first. I can't proceed with the build without saying yes to that, which closes my browser.

Any idea what I need to do differently? Edit and Continue is enabled, so it's not that.

[InvisibleDuncan]

Never mind - I've resolved it. I needed to turn Edit and Continue off.

[si_the_geek]

In similar situations I found that opening the browser yourself and navigating to the URL works well, as that browser is not "owned" by the debugging process.

There should be an option somewhere to prevent the debugger starting a browser instance, but I can't remember where.


edit: I was a bit too slow!

[InvisibleDuncan]

Thanks, Si. The edit and continue setting was causing IIS Express to close each time I stopped debugging. Turning that off allowed IIS Express to remain open, so I could navigate to the localhost in the browser.

Seems a little counterintuitive!