Home ReAttach - how to easily (re)attach the debugger in Visual Studio
Post
Cancel

ReAttach - how to easily (re)attach the debugger in Visual Studio

In more complicated projects, simple F5 doesn’t compile&debug. In cases where you’re working with IIS (w3wp process), we need to attach the debugger manually.

Attaching debugger

The simple gif below shows you how to attach it normally: Standard Visual Studio debugger attach

For the first time it’s ok, but repeating this step 10 times in hour is painful. Could this be done in one button or keyboard shortcut?

Tool to the rescue

ReAttach is a free tool which solves this exact issue. Just take a look at the picture below:

Attach debugger using ReAttach

It has many useful and simple features:

  1. Hotkey sequence CTRL+R, CTRL+[number] allows you to attach to one of the latest targets
  2. It waits for the process if it doesn’t exist yet (for example w3wp IIS\APPPOOL myapp)
  3. It supports all Visual Studio versions after and including 2010

You can install it from the Visual Studio Gallery and browse source code on github

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.