I recently uninstalled a certain productivity enhancement tool for VS 2008 which shall remain nameless because they are a good group of guys and have been very nice to me.
I uninstalled the tool, namely because I felt I was becoming a bit too dependant on it. Certainly, VS features like intellisense and basic refactoring support are not things I would willingly live without, but I feel that the features in VS are probably adequate for my needs and my IDE was starting to feel a bit clunky.
So, I uninstalled this tool, and immediately intellisense was missing. Anoying. I went into Tools->Options and re-enabled Intellisense. Life was good, or so it seemed.
For the last 5 weeks, the bane of my existence has been the fact that I couldn't set breakpoints in my code.
I could debug just fine if I right clicked + Breakpoints + Insert Breakpoint, or use F9, but when I tried to set the breakpoint on the left pane, as shown here, it just wouldn't work at all:
I was giving a class on TDD to one of my biggest customers today and in desperation, having right clicked + Breakpoints + Insert Breakpoint one too many times, I offered to buy lunch to the developer who could help me fix this. Now one developer offered the F9 option as workaround, which is better than a 3 step process, and this would have helped me out. Then, about 15 minutes later, another developer said they had the fix, and sure enough, he did!
The problem was that the "Indicator Margin" had been disabled. How did this happen? Why would this happen and what the hell is an Indicator Margin? Well, I don't have proof, but I am guessing that it is that "productivity" tool that did it when I uninstalled it.
The solution was simply to go into Tools->Options->Text Editor and enable Indicator margin as shown below:
I am forever indebted to this customer and am sharing this tip here in case this is driving you as nuts as it has me over the last month!