How can I debug my MVC application together with MVC contrib project downloaded from codeplex

Question

I want my MVC application to be step into MVC framework contrib project also when debugging.I have installed visual studio 2010 professional edition.

Answer 1

You mean http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com? They publish source, so probably the easiest way is to download their source and rebuild it yourself.

Essentially you need the assemblies, PDB files that correspond exactly to the built assemblies, and source code on disk where the PDB files can find this. You can either

1. rebuild the source yourself: this way you have new assemblies, new PDBs and source code on disk in the exact place referenced by the PDBs. Either add their projects to your solution build it in place. The downside with this is that they might have odd external dependencies that they might not include or a crazy build system so this might not be trivial. (A further downside is that you'll then be testing and debugging with your own build not their official release. Depending on your deployment policies you may prefer to run production code against the official build not your own, and there's a risk with switching back to the official build albeit minimal. Hopefully you have unit tests you can use to revalidate after debugging!)
2. download their PDBs - this looks like it's in their "Extras" download and unpack these alongside the corresponding assemblies on disk. Download their source and unpack theis too: if possible, into the same path that is hard-coded into the PDBs as the place where the source was built from (you'll be prompted for this the first time you try to step into it) or add the path you've extracted the source into to the source directories list under tools/options.

Either way you'll probably have to untick the 'step into my code only' option in Tools\Debugging unless you go down the add-to-your-solution route if you want to actually step into their code, although if you just want to catch exceptions inside their code and debug from there this shouldn't be necessary.