Unhandled exception of type ‘StackOverflowException’

While working on website project using Visual Studio 2015, I encountered this strange error message:

 An unhandled exception of type ‘System.StackOverflowException’ 
 occurred in System.Runtime.Serialization.dll

You may notice that if you click on View Detail... link of the exception message, there is no more information is available like stack trace etc.

I know there is no any complex logic defined in my code-base that could fall in infinite loop and cause StackOverflowException. After searching, I found the real cause of this error, and is not related to my code-base but a feature by Visual Studio know as Browser Link.

From MSDN blog:

Browser Link is just a channel between your Visual Studio IDE and any open browser. This will allow dynamic data exchange between your web application and Visual Studio.

Visual Studio uses this channel to exchange data between web application and Visual Studio, since it will serialze data before exchange, that was leading to StackOverflowException. The solution is just disable this feature.

There are two ways to disable this feature:

1. From Visual Studio, click on the small down arrow near Refresh Linked Browsers button, from the drop-down options listed, just un-check Enable browser link.

   

2. Add the following key in web.config appSettings tag.

    <add key=”vs:EnableBrowserLink” value=”false” />
   

Resources:

• Browser Link feature in Visual Studio