Debugging .NET code called from X++ code in AX 2012

Posted by ssmantha on Geeks with Blogs See other posts from Geeks with Blogs or by ssmantha
Published on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 07:30:57 GMT Indexed on 2011/11/11 17:54 UTC
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A very intriguing issue came to me to debug .Net code called from X++ code in AX 2012. This was indeed a challenge to be nailed down. Luckily the tools and some concepts helped me to achieve this task. Here it goes...

We need to do a seamless debugging from AX debugger to Visual Studio back and forth. To enable this we need to first see if the dll to be debug is present in GAC then we might need to uninstall it from it due to the order of preference .NET loads the assemblies. The assemblies are first loaded from GAC and then the runtime checks for Public and Private Assemblies. Since the assembly in GAC is always compiled with runtime optimizations it is difficult to debug. We need to unhook this assembly from GAC and then move further relying on >NET assembly loading patterns.

Step 1: Remove the target assembly to debug from GAC. Before that stop all the AOS servers and close all the instances of programs which rely on AOT e.g. all clients and even visual studio now.

Step 2: Build your sample code which is present in AOT in debug mode and get the dll file along with PDB files.

Step 3: Place these files in the Server\..\Bin and Client\bin directories of AX installation.

Step 4: Configure Visual Studio:

Step 4.1: Configure Debugging Options. In Visual Studio Go to Debug -> Options and Settings -> Debug node -> General sub node and disable “Enable Just My Code (managed)”

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Step 4.2: Specify the symbol loading directory options. Specify the locations for Client bin and server bin directories of the installation, remember to specify the correct instance of Server bin directory corresponding to your AOS.

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Step 4.3: Configure the project for debugging

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Step 5: Ready to go place your breakpoints in X++ and in .Net wherever necessary before this process...

Run the Visual studio project and it will invoke the AX client with your breakpoint hitting X++ code.. and when you do a step-in using F11 the Visual studio debugger will be active and from here onwards you would be able to debug the complete flow.

Debugging in seamless manner across debuggers is really very good feature and mostly underutilized, but by doing so we can have improved troubleshooting and saves a hell lot of time..

Stay tuned for more in Advanced Debugging..

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