Thursday, June 12, 2008

Debugging Assemblies in 'GAC'


Visual Studio requires the program database (.pdb) files to find the debugging information of any assembly. Now to debug assemblies in GAC we can either :
- Create a symbol server and put all the pdb files there and configure visual studio to use it.
- Or else we can copy the .pdb files to the global assemble cache folder.
Now the c:\windows\assembly folder is not the real folder where the files are stored, it is just a virtual folder. To get to the real folder, we need to do the following:
Click: Start -> Run
Type: %systemroot%\assembly\gac [ENTER]
This will open the real GAC folder where the files are saved. Now go 1 level up :
assemblyfolder

Go inside the folder [GAC_MSIL]. Find the folder [assembly Name] \ [assembly version in format of #.#.#.#]__[assembly public key token].
Open the folder and you would be able to see your assembly. Now copy the PDB file to that folder and then attach the debugger and enjoy debugging . . . !!

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