For those living their lives in Reflector this is very welcome news. Microsoft has released source code of .NET Framework. Shawn Burke has detailed instructions on how to configure VS2008 to use symbols and be able to download source on the fly while debugging. Lot of people have blogged about this. However, some may still have problems making this work. The first time I tried, I was not able to download the source either. I had experimented a lot with different symbol server settings before the source was actually released. Due to this I already had symbols in my local folder which is the reason why the new symbols were not getting downloaded and hence, the source was not getting downloaded. I deleted the local symbol cache and lo and behold, everything started working. Turns out, this was already mentioned in Shawn’s post. The key is to read the instructions properly and follow them. Hence I am posting key points below:
- Enable Symbol Server Support.
- Disable Just My Code.
- Configure Symbol URL correctly and provide local symbol folder.
- If already using Symbol server then delete the local symbol cache -this caused me some trouble for a bit.
- If the assembly shows grayed out in call stack window then right click and select Load Symbols.
John Robbins has also posted some additional tricks.
Happy Coding!