[Mono-dev] Mono Soft Debugger

[Mikael Lyngvig]

I am beginning to realize that the project of making a new debugger is 
sort of meaningless.  It turns out, now that I have studied MonoDevelop 
a bit more and done some searches on the Internet, that MonoDevelop 
already supports debugging stand-alone executables.  And that's 
precisely what I am looking for.  I regularly use batch and makefiles 
for my projects and have an excellent editor that I don't want to trade 
in for MonoDevelop, for which reason I am looking for a debugger that 
can handle stand-alone executables.

I just have a single, minor issue that I don't seem capable of solving: 
When I open an application using the Debug/Debug Application menu item, 
it opens the application, runs it immediately and therefore does not 
allow me to set breakpoints and single-step the program.  I have tried 
opening a source file beforehand and setting a breakpoint, but that 
doesn't seem to work either.

Is there a chance that MonoDevelop could be altered so that it set up a 
breakpoint on Main the very moment that the application is loaded?  That 
way, one could debug using MonoDevelop and I could perhaps spend some 
time helping out on MonoDevelop instead of wasting a lot of time on 
reinventing the wheel.

P.S. Should I file this as an enhancement request to MonoDevelop?

Cheers,
Mikael

Den 24-02-2011 22:36, Michael Hutchinson skrev:
> On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 12:24 PM, Mikael Lyngvig<mikael at lyngvig.org>  wrote:
>> Anybody knows of good documentation for the Mono Soft Debugger?  I am
>> hacking away on a hobby project that is a console mode debugger, but only
>> have the Mono and MonoDevelop sources to guide me.  The documentation in
>> Monodoc seems to very incomplete, which is understandable given the low
>> number of people that are going to use this API.
>>
>> Especially, I'd like information on how to clean up after the debugging
>> session is over.  I seem to get an unhandled exception (due to some Mono
>> Soft Debugger code being blocked in a call to Socket.ReadBytes()) no matter
>> what I do and it looks bad on the console.  I suspect that this exception
>> has gone uncaught in other code, such as MonoDevelop, because it appears to
>> occur in a separate thread and GUI apps don't output stuff to the console.
>> Or, alternatively, I am simply not cleaning up and shutting down the debug
>> session the way I should do.  That's definitely also a possibility.
> I would strongly suggest you use MonoDevelop's Mono.Debugging.Soft
> library instead of using Mono.Debugger.Soft directly. It does not
> depend on the rest on MonoDevelop.
>