Silverlight cannot be debugged. Abstract) unable to start debugging. Cannot locate Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The IE window cannot be opened during debugging

Original Author Kevin Yang

Original link http://www.imkevinyang.com/2009/09/%E8%A7%A3%E5%86%B3silverlight%E6%97%A0%E6%B3%95%E8%B0%83%E8%AF%95%E7%9A%84%E9%97% AE %E9%A2%98.html

I have encountered this problem recently. I don't know why, suddenly, my Silverlight project cannot be debugged when I press F5. The following dialog box is displayed: unable to start debugging. cannot locate Microsoft Internet Explorer.

If you run it directly, you can open it. However, Visual Studio still displays the same error.

I tried to restart my computer, reinstall Silverlight tools, create a clean test project, and modify the default browser of the system and Visual Studio (note, the default browser of the system and Visual Studio is set independently. Google has been around for a long time. Many posts on the Silverlight official forum are related to this, but I have carefully read it and found that no reply can solve my problem. A guy who posted a post solved the problem, but he ran away without explaining how to solve it. He strongly liked BS!

Finally, how did I solve this problem? I used the Process Monitor Tool (which is officially delivered by Microsoft sysinternal !). The worker process then finds that the process tries to access a non-existent file.

Process Monitor, which can monitor the activities of all processes in the current system, including operations on the file system, reading and writing the registry, network access, and thread activity. It is a very practical debugging and maintenance tool.

Open this tool and select devenv.exe. Start debugging in Visual Studio F5. The error dialog box is displayed immediately. OK. Pause pm. Otherwise, there are too many entries.

However, there are still too many event entries, So I filtered out the results for success, because we only focus on those failed entries.

Then the log entries are carefully checked and the root cause of the problem is discovered:

When Visual Studio is debugging or running, it will read the HKLM \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ app paths \ iexplore.exe item in the Registry, and then cannot read it. Therefore, the error is reported. No wonder the message "cannot locate Microsoft Internet Explorer" is displayed.

I open the Regedit Registry Editor, find this path, add the missing items, and return to Visual Studio F5. Finally, I can see it ~

I hope that my solution will inspire you. if you encounter a similar and inexplicable problem in the future, you can use the PM tool to troubleshoot the problem.