Better Alternative: Debugging Assemblies Located in the GAC
Posted by Steve Pietrek on February 28, 2008
I wrote a post listing steps for debugging assemblies located in the GAC. Today I ran into an issue, when I ran Start-Run-%SYSTEMROOT%AssemblyGAC, where the folder which contains my DLL was not available. After digging around, it appears the assembly is in the GAC but isn’t in the GAC.
Anyway, I poked around Visual Studio and found an improved option.
1. Open Visual Studio
2. Open Tools-Options and navigate to the Debugging item
3. Uncheck the option “Enable Just My Code (Managed only)”
4. Select Debug-Attach to Process.
5. Select the correct w3wp process. To know the correct w3wp process, see this post.
6. Set breakpoints accordingly.
Update: Doug Ware has a similar post – “great minds think alike”. It contains a little more information and pictures. Worth checking out.
