How to set a breakpoint when debugging a compiled executable when source is located on source server

Question

Hi erveryone,

My Question is:

How do I set a breakpoint, when debugging a binary executable in Visual Studio 2017 where I don't have any sources on my local machine?

The Setup:

• Win 10 PC with Visual Studio 2017 installed
• git as source repository in the local network
• TeamCity as Build Server also in the same local network
• TemaCity is setup as symbol and source server in Visual Studio

The Process:

1. Code gets written on the local machine and commited into the git repository
2. TeamCity Builds new binaries because of the commit
3. TemaCity also indexes the symbol and source files

The Problem:

Now I want to debug a specific binary build to see what went wrong. I Load the Binary into Visual Studio and run it in Debug Mode and when there is an unhandelt exception and the application crashed, Visual Studio downloads the symbol file and the source file from TeamCity and displays the correct location where the exception happened.
So the that works as expected.

But back to the question... How do I set a Breakpoint when I want to investigate what the binary is doing if it not crashes?

In the example above Visual Studio downloads only one single source file from the source server (the one in which the exception was thrown). Is there a way to browse the compelte source of this specific build in Visual Studio to set a breakpoint?

Answer 1

Call the debugger from your code with:

Debugger.Launch();

Just put this statement at the position where you want your code to break.

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnostics.debugger.launch?view=netframework-4.7.2