visual studio enterprise 2019

Question

I have many students that are using the visual basic in visual studio enterprise 2019 version. When they up-load them to Bb, the learning management system, they are zipped, the project folder. Which is all good.

But when I go to run the projects after I un-zip them they come up with an error (the debug profile does not exit) and I can not load the form1.vb either. the form it self. Never run into this problem ever with my VB class. What is going on?

Answer 1

This is one of the reasons I have switched to having my students use Github only. They tend to zip up the wrong stuff. Within the solution folder can be extra stuff such as cached info that can cause problems when loaded onto another machine. Using Github with a properly configured .gitignore file has dramatically reduced the issues I had with students submitting the assignments. Of course Github is a challenge to use as well but it is a critical skill for new developers anyway.

As for the issue you're seeing I suspect it is a setting issue in the project. We used to see this a lot in C++ projects for similar things. Are you having them create .NET Framework or .NET Core apps? It sounds like you're using .NET Core. Inside the project settings under the Debug tab is the Profile being used. The Default, for me at least, is VBCore which ships with VS I believe. However you can create a new profile and that information is stored in the launchSettings.json file as part of the project. Once a custom profile is created all the profile data is stored in that file, including the default.

In some cases cleaning the output first and then building the solution resolves the issue.