A couple of weeks ago my laptop was renamed as part of an Active Directory change. Since then I have been debugging problems related to services not starting or database connection strings that had the old machine name in them. This weekend I ran into another problem that I think was caused by the machine rename although I don't have any direct proof of that. When I would create a project in Visual Studio 2005 and attempt to debug it I would get the error that the binding handle is invalid. I was able to compile and run the application but not debug. Even something as simple as a default windows application with jsut Form1 in it wouldn't debug. I spent several hours on the option to fix Visual Studio 2005 but even after that I still got the error message.

I ended up looking on the Internet and found this is a known bug. The bug report shows it as a bug in the CTP that is closed but it had a workaround that fixed the problem for me. The solution is to not use the VShost for debugging. You do this by going into the project properties on the debug tab and unchecking the option to Enable the Visual Studio hosting process.

Just in case you are wondering what the Visual Studio hosting process is (I know I was) it is explained at http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mihirsolanki/archive/2005/11/06/133588.aspx as a process that enables faster debugging and also debugging in partial trust environments. For the most part I am all for that especially since I normally don't run as administrator on my machine but in this case I guess I will have to settle for slower and untrusted debugging that works until I have the time to repave my machine.