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How to turn off/disable the .NET JIT Debugging Dialog

Just quoting Scott Hanselman for this tip:

A day may come when you want to turn off the Debug dialog that appears when a .NET program has an unhandled exception.

Option 1: Registry key from Enabling JIT Debugging

For an application that includes managed code, the common language runtime will present a similar dialog to JIT-attach a debugger. The registry key that controls this option is called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DbgJITDebugLaunchSetting.

  • If value = 0, prompt the user by means of a message box. The choices are:
    • Continue. This results in a stack dump and process termination.
    • Attach a debugger. In this case, the runtime spawns the debugger listed in the DbgManagedDebugger registry key. If none, control is returned, and the process is terminated.
  • If value = 1, simply return control. This results in a stack dump, after which the process is terminated.  (No more dialog)
  • If value = 2, spawn the debugger listed in the DbgManagedDebugger registry key.

Option 2: If you want to disable the JIT debug dialog, but still want an error dialog:

Visual Studio.NET|Tools|Options|Debugging|Just-In-Time and deselect "Common Language Runtime" and now you’ll get an OK/Cancel dialog instead of the select a Debugger Dialog.  Note: The registry entry from Option 1 above will need to be 0 for the dialog to show up.

Thanks to Eric Deslauriers of Corillian QA for these tips!


This dialog can be useful in some cases (mainly in development), but annoying in most cases. But, what if I want to disable this dialog per application?

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