Debugging Silverlight with Microsoft Edge

Question

Since the 14th of February 2023 Microsoft has totally blocked the access to Internet Explorer 11. We still have Silverlight applications that are under active development. Anyone have a solution to debug Silverlight applications in Visual Studio?

• Internet Explorer 11 cannot be used any more
• AFAIK debug is not possible in Edge using IE mode.

Answer 1

Redirecting from IE to Edge is implemented with the “IEToEdge BHO” (Browser Helper Object).

We cannot disable this BHO with “Tools/Manage Add-ons” in IE because IE blocks disabling it.

But we can use the Sysinternals/Microsoft Autoruns tool to disable IE BHOs. Get and run the Autoruns tool, uncheck “Options/Hide Microsoft entries” and go to the IE tab. There should be two entries for “IEToEdge BHO” (32 and 64 bit). Uncheck the checkboxes in front of both entries, close all IE windows and start the good old Silverlight debugger with Internet Explorer target.

And voila it’s still alive!

… until the next Edge update or Microsoft decides to really delete the IE executables

Answer 2

Internet Explorer 11 is obsolete only on non-LTSC versions of Windows 10. If you have a Visual Studio subscription, you can download a LTSC edition of Windows 10 (LTSC 2021 is the latest) and it has IE11 working and enabled as a separate Windows application alongside Edge.

You can also use a Windows Server 2022 host as well, with the desktop experience feature installed.

Here's a list of Windows operating system version where IE11 is still supported:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-explorer-microsoft-edge

Answer 3

Sysinternals/Microsoft Autoruns no longer works for me.

To get around this, I used the silverlight for vs 2022 - Silverlight for Visual Studio

Build in VS as you normally would and set the Web debugging to IIS (or just create a directory and point to the application)

Startup the url in Edge - in settings > default browser - Add the localhost path to the ie mode section. Change it to allow

Refresh the page so it loads in IE mode

In Visual Studio - Debug > Attach to Process. Find the IExplorer process that has silverlight and attach to that. It should be good now.

If you need to debug server and client, use ctrl+click to then also select w3p alongside the IExplorer process