How to attach sources to referenced assembly in Visual Studio

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Roland Tepp picture Roland Tepp · Mar 20, 2011 · Viewed 10.6k times · Source

I am fairly new to Visual Studio, coming from Java development on Eclipse. Among other things I sorely miss from Eclipse is an ability to view source of binary assemblies.

In Eclipse I can attach reference to source code for a referenced jar and after that it is dead easy to navigate to the source, add breakpoints and debug those as though I have the libraries in my workspace.

Up to this point I have not managed to attach source code to an assembly reference.

Is it possible? How do I go about doing that (given that I do have access to the source code for this library)?

Answer

Joe Sarre picture Joe Sarre · May 22, 2012

Using VS2010 - you will first need to compile your referenced assemblies with debug symbols.

A couple of options are then:

  1. Find an object which you want to debug in Object Browser. Right click -> Navigate To -> Sources From Symbol Files.
  2. Step through your code until you step into the referenced assembly. At this point a dialog will pop up asking where the source files are. If it doesn't, or you cancelled it, then a "Browse to Find Source" will appear on the right. If this is greyed out, then that may be because you are referencing a release assembly.

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