How to break WinDbg in an anonymous method?
- by Richard Berg
Title kinda says it all. The usual SOS command !bpmd doesn't do a lot of good without a name.
Some ideas I had:
dump every method, then use !bpmd -md when you find the corresponding MethodDesc
not practical in real world usage, from what I can tell. Even if I wrote a macro to limit the dump to anonymous types/methods, there's no obvious way to tell them apart.
use Reflector to dump the MSIL name
doesn't help when dealing with dynamic assemblies and/or Reflection.Emit. Visual Studio's inability to read local vars inside such scenarios is the whole reason I turned to Windbg in the first place...
set the breakpoint in VS, wait for it to hit, then change to Windbg using the noninvasive trick
attempting to detach from VS causes it to hang (along with the app). I think this is due to the fact that the managed debugger is a "soft" debugger via thread injection instead of a standard "hard" debugger. Or maybe it's just a VS bug specific to Silverlight (would hardly be the first I've encountered).
set a breakpoint on some other location known to call into the anonymous method, then single-step your way in
my backup plan, though I'd rather not resort to it if this Q&A reveals a better way
