Debugging SP2007 Event Receiver in Visual Studio 2005

Question

I am trying to debug an event receiver by attaching to the SP sites w3wp.exe process, however the breakpoints are not being hit, and VS2005 is telling me no symbols have been loaded.

The Event Receiver is definitely installed and working.

I installed the event receiver by building a wsp file using makecab and using stsadm.

Have I missed a step? Everywhere I look on line they say it's as simple as attaching to w3wp...

Answer 1

There are a couple of options:

• you could try to manually copy the pdb file to c:\windows\assembly\gac_msil\yourassemblyname\version.
• I recommend using WSPBuilder, it allows you to copy assemblies to the gac and Visual Studio will know which pdb to use when it gets loaded.
• if you redeploy an assembly to the gac, IIS will not use the new version until you recycle the apppool or perform an iisreset
• not sure if this goes for vs2005 as well, but there might be checkboxes in the attach debugger window to "show all processes" and "show all sessions". Checking these will show all processes running on your machine and not jsut the ones you started.

Answer 2

There are normally a few w3wp.exe's. Are you sure you have attached to the right one?

Have you enabled debug in the web.config?

Have you got the pdb in the GAC too?