Visual Diagnostic is either disabled or is not supported by the current application

20
votes

with VS 2015 Enterprise i get always following message on a solution while debugging: XAML Visual Diagnostic is either disabled or is not supported by the current application

Tools - Options - Debugging - General:

  • Enable UI Debugging Tools for XAML is enabled
  • Preview selected elements in Live Visual Tree is enabled

I have tried:

  • VS Restart
  • Clean Solution / Rebuild
  • Fresh Checkout

Curious: If i start the solution without debugging and i attach the debugger to the process, it works ...

Update: If i select "Enable native code debugging" in project settings - debug, it works !

4
xamlvisual-studio-2015
If i select "Enable native code debugging" in project settings - debug, it works ! – Andreas-Lamp
As with many many things Visual Studio, I'm left asking why? Why did it work the first few times without this setting enabled, then suddenly stop? Why is this setting crucial and not documented as such on their walkthrough? msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt270227.aspx – Erikest
You should post this as the answer. This worked for me for a day, then quit. This setting fixes it. Why did it work before? Who knows. But checking this works. – Paul
Oh wow. This question needs an answer and more traffic. Thanks so much ! – Remco Ros

4 Answers

5
votes

I needed an additional debugging option to be disabled in order for the tools to work with my projects:

Tools - Options - Debugging - General:

  • Use Managed Compatibility Mode --> disabled
3
votes

I also faced this problem for some WPF projects that came to my pc from various sources. In my case the problem was in the project target framework - it was set to .NET Framework 3.5. The Live Visual Tree and the Live Property Explorer in VS 2015 do not work with .NET 3.5:

Inspect XAML properties while debugging
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt270227.aspx

So I just changed the target framework to .NET Framework 4.0 in the project properties dialog (the Application tab) to make these 'live' tools work.

0
votes

If you're having that problem in VS 2017 while debugging on a remote machine, installing the Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable (x64 in my case) made UI debugging work.

I always had this VM where UI debugging worked but my colleagues couldn't get it to work on their machines until I was experimenting with something where I had to uninstall all redistributables. After finishing my experiments I realized I couldn't debug the UI anymore. I reinstalled the 2017 redistributable and the functionality got enabled again.

0
votes

I faced the save issue on VS 2019. It happened all of a sudden on a project which it used to work on. Restarting VS did not help. But it got resolved after PC restart.