Tip 7.26: You can start debugging multiple projects

“Visual Studio Tips, 251 ways to improve your Productivity in Visual Studio“, courtesy of ‘Sara Ford”

Sara Ford’s Blog

Sara Aside This tip marked the one-year anniversary of doing the “Tip of the Day” series. Sara considers July 27, 2007, as the kick-off date of “Tip of the Day.” Wow, what a difference a post a day makes! Thanks to everyone who has been reading the series. It’s been an extremely rewarding experience to see these tips help people. And she also wants to express her thanks for all the motivation you have given her to continue writing. It takes her on the average 20 to 30 minutes to decide what tip to write, to capture the screen shots, and to add it to the queue. She refuses to do the math to see just how many puppies she could have potty-trained by now. She just doesn’t want to know. =D

Right-click the solution in the Solution Explorer, and select Properties. Go to the Common Properties–Startup Project page. (It’s the first page in the dialog box.)

You’ll see three option buttons:

• Current Selection This option selects whichever project had the inactive selection (that is, whichever project was selected previously) when you went to the Solution Property Pages.
• Single Startup Project Usually this is the first project you had in the solution, or it’s the project that you manually set as the startup project.
• Multiple Startup Projects And there was great joy! When this option is enabled, you can pick and choose which projects to start (and make sure you choose Start and not Start Without Debugging).

And using the preceding example, when she hits F5, she gets the following.