Visual Studio: How to stop breakpoint hit from stealing focus?

Ash_1630 0
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When a breakpoint is hit in Visual Studio, it steals the focus from whatever other application the programmer is viewing/typing into at that moment. This can be very irritating since VS grabs any keyboard input the programmer was typing into the other application at that moment and takes that input as its own.

What are the tricks you folks use to prevent this focus steal?

(I face this on Visual C++ 2008 and 2010. I am guessing it is a problem for Visual Studio in general and for all recent versions.)

visual-studio breakpoints focus debugging
5 Answers

This is finally fixed in VS2019. Go to Tools->Options->Debugging->General, down at the bottom is "Bring Visual Studio to the foreground when breaking in the debugger."
Just de-select it and you will no longer be interrupted while multitasking.

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user_5275160

By accident I discovered a workaround, which I've been using for a few years now and while I haven't tested it in 2008 and 2010, it certainly works in 2013, '15 & '17 and at least Windows 7 & 10.

It relies on the fact that Visual Studio will not steal focus if another Visual Studio instance is paused in execution. Obviously the only thing as special as VS is another VS. :-/

Open a second instance of VS with a simple project. Pause the execution of the project anyway you like (e.g. put a breakpoint on the first line of execution and debug), you can then simply minimise that VS and none of the VS instances you're actually using will steal focus.

This is is obviously a heavy weight solution, but if you have ample RAM (the CPU usage of the idle VS doesn't even register for me), it works well. I haven't tried it with inter-version instances (e.g. pausing in '13 to make '17 behave), but if that works you'll probably want to opt to use the older version instance as your "dummy" VS to cut down on resource use.

user_5147930
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