The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document

Here are some ways to fix the notorious "The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document" issue in Visual Studio. Many of the steps may not apply to your situation, but I've tried to make this a comprehensive list that you can check whenever you get this issue.
  1. Get latest code from Source Control
  2. Compile.
  3. Run iisreset to reset IIS if you are using IIS.
  4. Attach to the appropriate IIS instance (or all of them).
  5. Add a breakpoint and run your application.
If you miss step 3, your breakpoint will not be hit, even though your assemblies has compiled and breakpoint is shown as active. You may need to run iisreset in an administrator command prompt to ensure you have the right permissions.

Some more ideas if the above doesn't work:

Check where your dll is being referenced from and ensure that is the code you're trying to debug.

Check you are in the correct mode when building: Debug/Release as they may put the dlls in different places.

Are you attached to the correct process?

For a website on IIS, is the code you're working on the same as the code running in IIS? 

Go to Debug > Windows > Modules and if the relevant dll is there, right click it and load symbols.
If it's not in the list, try running the code anyway. Sometimes even though it says the breakpoint will not be hit, it's only because the dll is not loaded until you enter a scenario that needs it. Try the scenario that depends on the dll, and it may just hit the breakpoint anyway.

Restart your browser. You might have something cached from an older dll.

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Do you have any other tricks to get around this issue? Leave a comment!

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