I have seen many articles that said Edit and Continue does not work in ASP.Net for Visual Studio 2005. Well, it works for me and here is how to enable it. I have showed many people how to enable this and every time I show someone I have to figure it out again. So I am putting this out there to hopefully save someone else the frustration.
To enable Edit and Continue there are 2 separate setting. The first is under Tools.. Options. Open the Debug section of the tree and click on the Edit and Continue Group. Make sure “Enable Edit and Continue” is checked. If you are using the VS 2005 Professional you may need to click a checkbox at the bottom of this screen saying something like Show all Options.
The second setting is in a strange place. I am not sure if this works with the new Web Projects introduced in 2005. We are using the Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project which may have something to do with it. Open up the solution you are attempting to debug, right click on the web project, and click Properties. When the property window opens click down to the “Web”. Check the Enable Edit and Continue box and you should be all set.
I will never understand why there are two places you have to enable this, but at least it works.
UPDATE: You must be at a break point in your code to edit. You cannot edit method signatures, add new methods, etc. Changes like that were not what Edit and Continue were designed for and I can’t even start to think how that would be implemented by Microsoft.
UPDATE (again): I recently started working with Visual Studio 2008. This fix applies to that version as well.
FINALLY!
My goodness, this lack of Edit and Continue has been driving me nuts.
Thanks for for having the insight to post this!
Comment by Happy again — January 8, 2008 @ 10:36 pm
Any idea how/whether “Edit and Continue” can be enabled when using IIS instead of Development Server?
Comment by kamiwa — May 22, 2008 @ 4:50 pm
Sorry Kamiwa I have never tried it. When I get into work this morning I will see if it works on my development machine.
Comment by Shaun — May 22, 2008 @ 6:31 pm
YOU made my day. I was going crazy figuring how to turn ‘Edit and Continue’ feature ON
Thank YOU
Comment by Mohan — May 30, 2008 @ 9:49 pm
Well, a couple problems.
First, when I right click on a web project in VS 2005, I don’t have an option for “Properties” I only have a “Property Pages” option, and it does not have all the same stuff shown above. THis is an ASPX AJAX application, I don’t think that has anything to do with it though.
I can edit, but I cannot continue. That has always been the case for me with vs 2005 though, and I just thought that was how it works, which to me didn’t make any sense. Who cares if I can edit the code if I can’t continue after I edit?
Comment by Josh — August 13, 2008 @ 2:15 am
I no longer have Visual Studio 2005 but I am pretty sure this is because you are not using the Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects (http://webproject.scottgu.com/).
I am not sure how you would enable edit and continue without these. If you have the time you may want to convert over to the web application projects.
Comment by Shaun — August 13, 2008 @ 2:25 am
I am so grateful that you posted this information!
Thank you!
Comment by Ira Rus — April 2, 2009 @ 12:57 am
Thank you!!
Lovely to see and I ‘zoomed’ through process and its working.
Bless you.. you’ve made a developer happy!!
Comment by Fawad — June 10, 2009 @ 3:10 pm
Was wondering why my edit and enable was disabled…thanks…u saved a lot of time!! ..:)
Comment by Shree — July 19, 2009 @ 10:34 pm
Does not work for me. I tried the steps but I still can not edit and continue. Any suggestions?
Comment by Calvin — August 11, 2009 @ 9:24 pm
The above project properties are only available when you have the Web Application Project setup in Visual Studio 2005. This project type compiles the website into a single dll, much like Studio 2003 did for ASP.NET 1.1, and hence supports Edit and Continue.
Most of us using Studio out-of-the-box, are creating new ASP.NET Web Sites from the installed templates. This project type does not support Edit and Continue.
Comment by Chris — August 27, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
Dude!!! are you great or what???
Comment by Mitech — September 4, 2009 @ 12:59 pm