Troubleshooting

Start with vs_ping

Ask Claude to run vs_ping. Its summary leads with what is wrong. The usual answers:

  • No solution open, or still loading. Open the solution and wait for it to finish loading.
  • A modal dialog is open. Visual Studio refuses outside requests while a dialog waits for you. Close it.
  • The extension is not answering (bindingMethod is not vsix-inproc). Restart Visual Studio. After installing or updating Wheelhouse, it is not loaded until you do.

A bar says Wheelhouse is not fully set up

The bar names the step that could not finish:

  • Claude Code is not installed. Install Claude Code, then restart Visual Studio.
  • The .NET 10 runtime is not installed. Install it from dotnet.microsoft.com. Terminal sessions cannot use the server until you do; the panel still works.
  • CLAUDE.md has only one of the two markers. Someone edited out a marker. Put it back, or remove the other, and restart Visual Studio.

Trial and licence

  • "Your Wheelhouse trial has ended". The panel and the in-process tools stop until a key is entered. Claude Code in a terminal keeps working, with the slower tools. Buy a licence, or paste a key you already have into the card.
  • "Wheelhouse needs to confirm your licence". A licensed computer that has not reached wheelhouse.mountainstar.co.uk for 30 days asks to check in. Connect to the internet and start a session; it confirms itself.
  • A key is refused. The message says why. If every seat is in use, open the link in the purchase email and remove a computer that no longer uses Wheelhouse (computers unseen for 90 days free their seat on their own). A refunded licence is revoked, and its key stops working.
  • "Could not reach" the site. Wheelhouse checks keys with wheelhouse.mountainstar.co.uk over HTTPS. A proxy or firewall that blocks it stops a new key being activated; a computer already licensed carries on for 30 days.

Signing in to Claude

If Claude Code is not signed in, the panel shows a card instead of starting. Choose Sign in with your Claude account, or Use an Anthropic Console account for API billing, and finish in the browser window that opens; the session starts by itself. If the sign-in page shows a code instead of returning you (on a remote desktop, say), paste it into the card and press Submit code. The panel uses Claude Code's own sign-in, so signing in there also signs in Claude Code in a terminal, and the other way round.

Show Claude what you see

When something looks wrong, ask Claude to take a picture: of Visual Studio, of one window ("look at the Error List"), of a dialog Visual Studio is showing, or of the app you are debugging, even while it is stopped at a breakpoint. The pictures stay on your computer, under %TEMP%\Wheelhouse\screenshots, apart from the one Claude is shown.

The log

Wheelhouse writes a diagnostic log to %TEMP%\vs-claude-mcp-bridge.log. Lines starting setup: describe the first-start steps; a healthy start after an update shows one Upgrade line and nothing else. The bar's Open the log link opens it.

Reporting a problem

In the panel's settings, under Versions, Report an issue opens the report form with your Wheelhouse, MCP server and Visual Studio versions already filled in. The last few dozen lines of the log help a great deal; paste them into the description.

Tools are missing in a terminal session

Run /mcp in the session. If vs-claude-mcp is not listed, run claude mcp list; if it is missing there too, restart Visual Studio to let Wheelhouse register it again. A session started before an update keeps the old tool list until you reconnect it with /mcp.

Turning off first-start setup

Set the environment variable VS_CLAUDE_MCP_SETUP=0 before starting Visual Studio, and Wheelhouse leaves its server, the registration and CLAUDE.md alone. Setup never runs in Visual Studio's experimental instance.

Removing Wheelhouse completely

Uninstall it from Extensions › Manage Extensions. A VSIX runs nothing when it is removed, so remove what the first start added yourself:

claude mcp remove vs-claude-mcp --scope user
Remove-Item -Recurse "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\vs-claude-mcp"

Then delete the block between the vs-claude-mcp markers in ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md.