Visual Studio Code not loading symbols on OS X

Question

I am trying to set up a web api using ASP.NET Core on OS X. I have set up my environment correctly (I think) and I'm able to build and run my application using dotnet build from the terminal, and I'm able to start debugging from Visual Studio Code with breakpoints working as expected. My problem is that I receive an error when trying to query my Sqlite database using EF core. EF core is not really important here, because when I am debugging and trying to find out what the error is, I don't get any stack trace. When I step over the failing code the debug console prints:

Exception thrown: 'System.InvalidOperationException' in Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.dll
Loaded '/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App/1.0.0/System.Diagnostics.StackTrace.dll'. Cannot find or open the symbol file.
Loaded '/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App/1.0.0/System.Reflection.Metadata.dll'. Cannot find or open the symbol file.
Loaded '/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App/1.0.0/System.IO.MemoryMappedFiles.dll'. Cannot find or open the symbol file.
Loaded '/usr/local/share/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App/1.0.0/System.IO.UnmanagedMemoryStream.dll'. Cannot find or open the symbol file.

A lot of these Cannot find or open the symbol file. are printed at startup as well. I have checked that the files are at the location specified, and that there shouldn't be any read access problem (having started vs code with sudo code . and even done a sudo chmod 777 * in the folder in question).

So, any ideas why the symbols aren't loaded?

Answer 1

Ran into the same issues running VS Code on a Windows 10 VM.

The resolution I found was to add a "debugType": "portable" setting to the buildOptions section of my project.json file.

Mine looks like this:

"buildOptions": {
    "emitEntryPoint": true,
    "preserveCompilationContext": true,
    "debugType": "portable"
}

Debugging in VS Code isn't that bad actually.

Answer 2

I think you have confused what VSCode is saying it cannot load. It isn't saying that it can't load the DLL. 'Symbol' files have a .PDB extension. In order to debug an error generated by a DLL, a debugger needs the corresponding symbol file, so changing the permissions on the DLL won't make the error go away if the PDB file is not there.

I've just started using VSCode on a Mac and from what I can see, you don't get the PDB files if you install dotnet core with Homebrew (which is what they recommend) and I see similar messages when I startup the debugger. That doesn't stop me from debugging my own code because there is a PDB file generated with my DLL. It would only cause a problem if you needed to debug something going wrong inside dotnet core itself.