Fixing TeamCity errors in the Visual Studio experimental instance

The good people at JetBrains obviously think Visual Studio extensibility isn’t painful enough already, and the latest version of their otherwise nice TeamCity continuous integration server makes it positively excruciating.  The Visual Studio add-in for TeamCity 5.1 installs itself into the experimental instance as well as the main instance, and makes a complete pig’s ear of the debugging experience.  Not only does TeamCity fill up the debug window with endless first-chance InvalidOperationExceptions, making it hard to see your own debug output, but whenever you close a document window or Visual Studio itself under the debugger, TeamCity throws a NullReferenceException or InvalidOperationException and breaks into the debugger.  This gets very tedious very quickly.

You can’t remove TeamCity through Extension Manager or Add-In Manager, but there is an obscure dialog that allows you to ‘suspend’ it:

• Go into Tools > Options
• In the list on the left, select TeamCity
• Click the Suspend button
• Click OK

(This dialog is helpfully documented in the Resharper help file, the obvious place to look for TeamCity troubleshooting.)

As a parting gift, TeamCity will throw a few more spurious exceptions (“No application shell running.”  Er, yes it is), but after that you should be able to run the experimental instance under the debugger without getting bogged down in stupid errors.

Well, except the ones in your own code, of course.