While running .NET code, I usually forget that you can, and often should just run the application without debugging. Steve Smith dropped this hot tip in his excellent podcast, Weekly Dev Tips, specifically Episode 37: Debugging Tips. I know, I know: how the heck do you forget something this obvious? No idea.

So, here’s the deal: if you hit cntrl-F5 instead of F5, Visual Studio will launch your application without loading all the symbols and attaching the debugger.

Symbols, by the way, are basically information about how the compiler turned your code into machine code - an assosciation can then be created between what instruction is being executed and your beautful lines of code. If you don’t load those things and attach the debugger, some precious time and resources can be saved.

I’m currently working on a decently sized ASP .NET MVC application that wraps an Angular 6 application in a view. The Angular app is where I spend a lot of my time, so typically I just want to debug that in the browser rather than debugging the .NET code.

Give it a shot!