Monogame beginner tutorial - "Attach..." instead of debugger

Hey, all! I just started learning MonoGame and I’ve run into an instant snag. I followed this tutorial:

https://docs.monogame.net/articles/getting_started/1_setting_up_your_development_environment_windows.html
https://docs.monogame.net/articles/getting_started/2_creating_a_new_project_vs.html

I followed the tutorial exactly. My solution explorer shows “Solution ‘Pong’” (0 projects) and instead of “Pong” in the debugger, it shows “Attach.”

When I go click into the dropdown for Attach, I see this:

I don’t see an mcgb option when I scroll down.

To me, it looks like a debugger isn’t automatically loading, but I don’t understand why or what I need to do to fix it. I was also frankly expecting a pre-built Pong template to populate and it obviously didn’t. I have Windows 11. I’ve uninstalled/reinstalled once and repaired once. Any suggestions are welcome.

Hi @bahbahbluesheep, Welcome to the Community!

Please have a look here:

Observe the:

Specifically:

4-

Things to include in your Thread Post

And to tackle the issue at hand, can you state what project you attempted to create, and give my guide for a UWP Project here EDIT a go:

Pay special attention to the last post there as well.

Happy Coding!

EDIT I know you pointed to the OpenGL project but need to confirm.

Hi, friend! I indeed searched for about two hours before coming to the forum. I get where you’re coming from, but I hesitated to come because I was afraid I’d get negative feedback about asking an obvious question. Sometimes we need help, and that’s okay.

I in fact found the very informative post that you’ve copied and cross checked it with the original tutorial I found and also added in the individual components (including the debugger) on my reinstall. However, I didn’t follow past your choice of MonoGame Windows Universal XAML because I wasn’t planning on using DirectX or XAML. Looking at it now, the slides after that don’t seem to apply to my problem – I don’t get Debux x64 or Local Machine. I’ll go ahead and create a project in XAML and see if it fixes the problem with the openGL one, anyway, though.

I have no code. If you look at the links I posted, they are literally just a tutorial to set up Visual Studio and MonoGame. All I’m trying to do at the moment is set up the environment and run the debugger. I tested this with the Pong program provided in the tutorial again with a blank project simply titled MyFirst Game.

Thank you for all the time you’ve spent on your resources. They’re super helpful, and I’ll run through my individual components again to see if there’s something I missed. So far, they just didn’t fix my problem.

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Oh no, if I was saying that I would have said it :slight_smile: you were nowhere near that area.

Just want to make sure your setup is, in order… let us know…

Just build a blank template, get that going first.

:raised_hands:

Hey, @bahbahbluesheep, did the templates get properly installed? When you go to create a new project in Visual Studio, do you see all of the MonoGame options shown in the picture here? Creating a Project with Visual Studio 2022 | MonoGame Documentation.

If the template is working correctly, creating a new DesktopGL project should result in a solution with one project in it, with a pre-build “Game1.cs” file and a “Program.cs” file.

if you don’t see the templates, try opening the terminal in Visual Studio (either press Ctrl + ` or click View > Terminal) and paste the following line and press enter:

dotnet new --install MonoGame.Templates.CSharp
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What I observed:

The Templates show up in your template selection…

C:\Users\%USERPROFILE%\.nuget\packages\monogame.framework.windowsdx\3.8.1.303

Can you check here to see if all the files show up? you can copy and paste the entire text above in File Explorer.

image

I am thinking about one more thing but just looking for it right now.

EDIT

@HopefulToad hit the trigger, basically the NuGet process probably did not complete or the install templates thing, so, try hitting that step again, or as above, try the terminal thing.

The reason you’re getting “Attach” is because you have 0 projects in the solution so there’s no projects to run. I don’t know if the project didn’t get created, or it did get created and didn’t get added to solution. If the former you’ll just have to try creating project again. If the latter you’ll have to add it to your solution manually, right click on the solution node, click add project and find the .csproj file on your disk, it’s probably right next to your solution file.

Searching the forum might not get good results, because this isn’t really a MonoGame question, but rather general C# and .NET, google will give better results when you know what to search for, in this case “c# adding projects to solution”.

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Aha! It let me add the project but produced an error that the SDK could not be found! I can work with that. Thank you all for your suggestions and help!

@MrValentine, I’ve discovered that my issue was C# but also that I was missing an SDK! I just wanted to let you know that I took the nuclear option and just uninstalled everything and reinstalled again, following your tutorial step by step. Fingers crossed, let’s see how this goes.

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Score! The problem was that I downloaded the sdk with visual studio and again independently, and that was bugging up the paths. I uninstalled the second sdk and it completely solved the problem. Thank you so much for giving me a path to follow.

3.7?