Through a serendipitous series of links on the ol’ intarweb, I came upon this excellent post by the always excellent Jessica (aka JFo) on setting up a symbol server in Visual Studio 2003. A symbol server allows you to debug code to which you don’t own the source. I knew you could do this, but never had the need to do it at work (I’m a library author at work). But recently, I’ve been writing my own controls and I find some things are happening that I’m not expecting, so I figured I’d set this up in Visual Studio 2005. If you follow Jessica’s instructions you’ll quickly become confused, like I did: they moved the spot where you configure this.

In Visual Studio 2005, click Tools -> Options. Expand the Debugging node and select the Symbols sub-node. Click the folder icon. Type in the location of the symbols. In my case I want Microsoft’s public symbols; you can find them here: http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols. Type the above as the new entry. For Microsoft’s public symbols, you’ll have to enter a folder location to cache them. You should have something like the following:

Once you click OK, you’ll have to agree to a EULA. I used Jessica’s test  from the post above to see if it was working. It wasn’t. The symbols weren’t being loaded by the IDE automatically. Maybe I did it wrong? Went back tried again; checked my settings. Nothing. Hmmm. When in doubt right-click: I found the answer on something I clicked on, I can’t remember what it was.

But I do remember the answer: there’s a setting on the General sub-node of the Debugging node of the Options dialog called Just My Code that is selected by default. That’s why the symbols weren’t loaded. De-select that setting; run Jessica’s sample app and you get the breakpoint. Yay! You’ll also note that the red dot has a + sign in it when the breakpoint is hit, unlike a break point in your code.

Technorati tags: Visual Studio 2005, Debugging 

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Tags: .NET
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