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Background: I have a Visual Studio 2008 solution containing three different web application projects. If I right click on the solution, choose "Set Startup Projects.." and then choose "Multiple Startup Projects", I am able to fire them all up at once when I hit F5 (Start Debugging).

Desired Behavior: What used to happen (until it unexpectedly stopped working) was that it would automatically open up three browser instances (IE by default) and run each of the web apps in each of the three browser windows.

Current (Undesired) Behavior: All of a sudden, instead of opening three browser windows, it now opens a single browser instance and sequentially starts them all up with the exact same window/tab, which means that I am left with only one app actually running. (Whatever the last app it was that got started.)

Any idea what could cause this? I've checked my project and browser settings (including the "Reuse windows when launching shortcuts" option) and can't seem to figure it out. Any ideas?

Update: I changed Visual Studio's default browser to Firefox, and it works as expected by opening up multiple browser windows. I guess I'll just use Firefox when debugging for now, which is probably a good thing anyway.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I don't know why it had stopped working but rather have a suggestion: Check 'Don't open a page. Wait for a request from an external application.' option under 'Start Options' page of your Web project property pages. It specifies that Visual Studio won't open the browser window automatically. It should start your project in a Web server and wait for another application to make a request.

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Yeah, that would work; although then I would have to open the browser windows manually which is what I'm trying to avoid. Interestingly, I changed Visual Studio's default browser to Firefox, and it works as expected. (opens multiple browsers) Go figure.
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This seems to be a bug/feature in newer instances of MSVS and/or IE.

It happens in Visual Studio 2013 and 2015 as well, and might not be a bug as such, but can certainly be an undesired behaviour.

To reproduce: Select 2 web projects in multiple startup projects. Set one to Startup and the other to Start without debugging.

Only one browser tab is used, but you will see the tab used briefly by each project before the next one is loaded. The problem is that the last loaded project is not necessarily the project you want to have in the browser.

An other workaround is to simply set both projects to Start.

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It turns out using Firefox did the trick for me. Since there are no other answers, I will just accept this one.

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