Debugging T4 Template in VS 2010 Crashes IDE

Question

I'm trying to debug a slightly-modified version of the ADO.NET POCO Entity Generator template using the directions Oleg Sych published a few years back. I modified the DbgJITDebugLaunchSetting key as recommended.

I get a dialog indicating that a user-defined breakpoint has been hit. However, rather than being presented with the option to start a new instance of VS 2010 to debug, the original instance of VS 2010 just crashes and auto-restarts.

Is it possible to debug T4 templates with VS 2010?

Answer 1

in Visual Studio 2010 you need to call Debugger.Launch() before Debugger.Break().

Answer 2

You also need debug=true:

<@#template debug="true" #> System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); Debugger.Break();

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126338.aspx

Answer 3

Final solution which works for me:

regedit:

Key (x86 systems): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework

Key (x64 systems): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework

value: DbgJITDebugLaunchSetting

data: 0x2

tt template:

<#@ template debug="true" hostSpecific="true"  #>
<# System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); Debugger.Break(); #>