Tips for writing an Interop Debugger

Interesting Finds: January 16, 2007

Jason Haley — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 07:00:33 GMT

Interesting Finds: January 16, 2007

Jason Haley — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 07:02:14 GMT

re: Tips for writing an Interop Debugger

Alois Kraus — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:33:18 GMT

Hi Mike,

do you know a way to modify existing pdbs to preserve the debugging experince when doing a full ILDASM/ILASM round trip like here:

http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2007/01/23/104288.aspx

When I load the changed dlls into the debugger my breakpoints stay gray. I guess this is because the debugger compares some hashes at module level which I would have to change to get a decent debugging experience. Is that the only obstacle or are more things lurking inside a pdb file?

Yours,

Alois Kraus

round tripping PDBs

jmstall — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 09:41:26 GMT

Alois -

There may be some tips about debuggability and round-tripping here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmstall/archive/2006/01/13/debug-roundtripping.aspx

The pdbs have a hash of the source files used at a compile time. If you change a source file, the hash mismatches. I've been meaning to write a blog entry demonstrating this.

The latest MDbg sample (download link available at http://blogs.msdn.com/jmstall/archive/2005/11/08/mdbg_linkfest.aspx) also has a Pdb<-->Xml tool, complete with a demo of converting a pdb to an xml file, editing it, and converting it back. That's more academic, but I'm mentioning it for completeness sake.

If all else fails, you may want to ask that over on the forums at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=868&SiteID=1