Orchard CMS Quick Tip–Always Start Without Debugging

When you’re working on Orchard CMS in Visual Studio you will probably be tempted to press F5 as you normally do to start the solution in a web browser. Don’t do it!

You’ve probably already noticed that it takes a long time for it to spin up.

A quicker alternative is to press Ctrl-F5 (Start without debugging). A lot of the time you probably won’t need the debugger anyway. When you do need it you can just attach it without having to restart.

As a bonus you won’t see “Edit and Continue” issues every time you try to modify the source code when its running without debugging:

Starting the debugger manually

Click Attach to Process… in the Debug menu:

(Once you get used to this you will remember it’s Ctrl-Alt-P)

Then select your webserver, most likely iisexpress.exe:

And click Attach.

It will quickly attach debugger. Switch back to your web browser and carry on using it as normal. Do whatever you need to do to make it trigger the breakpoint or throw the exception you wanted to debug.