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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

One of the utility killers of edit and continue in web development is that when you stop debugging, it always stops the webserver. Which means you have to start debugging again just to test tiny code changes where a quicker build would suffice.

If they haven't fixed that, to me anything the do to edit and continue is fairly moot.

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I'm confused, the whole point of EaC is to not have to stop the debugger? I would hazard a guess you're not debugging on iis, as detaching a debugger certainly doesn't stop the webserver.

It certainly does on IIS Express. You have to disable edit & continue to get it to work. I'm not imagining this, it's a highly upvoted SO question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19568762/how-can-i-preven...

There's a whole list of things you still can't do while EaC is running. So you're going to have to stop it a lot, EaC might help when debugging or tweaking, but for new code you're going to have it off.

They even confirm this stupid behaviour in this blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2013/07/11/enable-edi...

That does sound annoying, IIS (non-express) seems to not have this issue though. Agree with debugging and tweaking though, my largest complaint is that you can't edit methods that contain lambda expressions.

That kills me for the first 5 minutes of every VS install I do as it's turned on by default.

Regardless of that however, edit and continue is not that useful when you have unit tests and program to interfaces.

Your other option is to detach the debugger (Debug->Detach All): stops the debugging experience in VS, while keeping the webserver process alive. Little more clumsy than clicking the stop debug button, but gives you what you want

Completely agree with you.

I was using constantly edit&continue at my previous job, doing desktop applications.

But I can't use it anymore in my new jobs since we do ASP.NET Web API :(

I guess the problem lies more with IIS than with VS but still ...

If you disable E&C, it will not kill IIS. You can just edit, recompile the code and IIS (express) automatically picks up the changes.

Yeah but still less good than E&C on desktop app development ;)

Yep. The first thing I do is turn that off for all the projects. Super annoying.

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