Solving some Visual Studio IDE Errors

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/solving_some_visual_studio_ide_errors.htm]

My harddrive crashed the other day, which caused me to re-install our entire Visual Studio.Net solution. Initially all seemed well, but then I stumbled across three environmental problems:

• I couldn't open certain web pages in design mode (that inherited directly from a non-System.Web.UI.Page class
• I couldn't navigate to definitions for methods, properties, variables, etc...
• I couldn't directly debug a web application.

While I could still technically write code, the lack of these features is just annoying. I solved the first two by deleting the \bin and \obj directories and rebuilding. I'm guessing that some meta data got corrupted and this resetted it. I actually created a batch file that just takes care of this for me now; something as simple as:

rmdir /Q /S C:\MyProject\Web\bin rmdir /Q /S C:\MyProject\Web\obj

The third issue I still wasn't able to directly resolve. However I can get around it by manually attaching to the process. To manually attach:

1. Click Debug > Start without debugging
2. Click Debug > Processes
3. Select the aspnet worker process and click "attach".

I actually like this more because it's much quicker to start. I guess that makes the hard-drive crash a blessing in disguise.