Question

This is an IDE question for Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition. It might be a bug in the IDE, or maybe it’s my fault somehow?

My main form is named frmMain and in my application’s properties I have set frmMain as my startup object. All of that seems like what a lot of software engineers do.

But while debugging I hit Ctrl + Break, as I have done for years, and I get an behavior in the IDE that I wasn’t expecting. Upon doing so, I get the green background text and the green arrow indicating in a tooltip:

This is the next statement to execute when this thread returns from the current function.

Even if I didn’t have the designer document open, it automatically opens frmMain.Designer.vb in the editor and hihglights line in green. The line is of course: Partial Class frmMain which is line 2 of the file. (Yes, it’s highlighting the second line of the designer-generated code.)

frmMain seems to have fully loaded and it’s my startup object. As far as I know, there shouldn’t be a “next statement to execute” at all because code should be idle. I don’t want to see the Designer.vb document… I want to edit my own code.

What’s causing this? Even though my form is behaving just fine, could there somehow be an unfinished aspect of loading the form such that it is “not returning” from a function?

Answer 1

I found the answer on my own:

I checked the “Enable application framework” checkbox in the solution’s properties, and all is well!

I believe this issue arose when I was working on experimental code in which I had desired to make Sub Main my startup object. I had cleared the checkbox because doing so is necessary to use Sub Main.

When the experiment didn’t pan out I reset the startup object back to frmMain, and my app worked fine. However I had not re-checked the box. I hadn’t noticed the change in the IDE behavior for several days (when I needed the more standard behavior) so I had not observed any correlation.

Although checking that box is definitely the solution, it’s still not exactly clear to me is what the heck this box actually does, other than cause me to spend a lot of time on StackOverflow.com! 😉

To others who encounter a similar situation, I’m now quite confident that my settings were not corrupt, and if you’re using the Express edition, please don’t be mislead by MS documentation which may lead you to believe it’s the “Just My Code” option. This option cannot be changed in the Express versions. (But it’s not because you can’t turn it on — It’s because you can’t turn it OFF in Express!)

Thanks to everyone for your efforts.