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Skip the 'Do You Want to Run the Last Successful Build?' Question when Debugging in Visual Studio

When I pressed F5 to start debugging and Visual Studio found a compile-time error, nothing irritated me more than the dialog box Visual Studio popped up that asked, "There were build errors. Would you like to continue and run the last successful build?"

Let me be clear: No, I didn't want to run "the last successful build." I never wanted to run "the last successful build." Who in the world would want to run "the last successful build?" Like any other rational human being in the world, I wanted to run the version of the code with the changes I had just finished making ... well, after I fixed the compile errors, I mean.

So I turned that idiot message off.

If you also want to get rid of that message, then go to Tools | Options | Projects and Solutions | Build and Run. In the right-hand panel under "On Run, when build or deployment errors occur," change the selected item in the dropdown list to Do Not Launch. Now, when you have build errors, Visual Studio will just sit there. You'll have to get into the habit of checking your Error List to find out why you're not in debug mode but, for me, that didn't take me very long.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/08/2019


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