How can I set a breakpoint in referenced code in Visual Studio?
Click Debug, New Breakpoint, Break at Function, then enter the full name of the function.
In Visual Studio open the source file of your referenced DLL that contains the desired method manually using menu
File > Open > File...
Then set the breakpoint by clicking on the left border in the code editor. This enables you to break at any code line and not just at function calls. Visual Studio shows the breakpoint in a kind of disabled state, because it thinks that the code is unreachable. Just ignore it; the breakpoint will become active once the code runs and the DLL has been loaded.
Note: you must reference a Debug version of your assembly for this to work.
You can do one of the following:
- Add the DLL project to the solution containing your executable. Then you can set breakpoints as normal.
- You could instead just open the DLL project and use the Debug -> Attach to Process to attach to your running EXE
I know this is an old question, but may be of help to many.
For the debugger to work correctly, you need to load debugging symbols database, a .pdb file with the same name as the assembly you want to debug. If it's part of a solution you created you could just copy-paste it from the other solution's bin folder. Then add a breakpoint specifying the full path to the method you want to debug, plus the name of the assembly it lives in. EX: "MyNamespace.MayClass.MyMethod, MyAssemblyName"
If you don't own the code you have 2 options, both involving a dissasembler. I use dotPeek for this, since it really rocks.
Option 1: you open the assembly with dotPeek and create a single .pdb for that, then copy it to your .bin folder and follow the steps above. https://www.jetbrains.com/decompiler/help/Generating_PDB_Files.html
Option 2: use dotPeek Symbol Server and PDB Generation. https://www.jetbrains.com/decompiler/help/Symbol_Server_and_PDB_Generation.html After that follow the instructions above to attach a debugger instance.
Hope this helps