Visual Studio 2010: Debug the .NET assemblies

The .NET framework is under heavy development and bugs are removed by Microsoft developers when found. However, you may still experience major bugs that might cause your application to crash. Sometimes it is even hard to determine whether it is a bug in your own code or in the framework. This issue has been taken to a new level in Visual Studio 2010. A feature, which by default is disabled in Visual Studio, enables you to debug the entire .NET source code directly within VS2010. Previously tools like .NET Reflector and ILSpy were required to identify any bugs in the .NET framework.

To enable .NET framework code debugging, please do the following:

Visual Studio 2019

To enable .NET framework code debugging in VS2019 please visit Debug the .net assemblies.

Visual Studio 2010

1) In Visual Studio 2010, select Debug -> Options and Settings...
The Options dialog is displayed.

2) Select Debugging in the left menu (se picture below) and check the option Enable .NET Framework source stepping.

When running your application in debug mode, Visual Studio will download the .NET source code when needed. Please be aware that the source code might use a lot of free space on your hard drive depending on how many .NET assemblies that are in use.

.NET: Alternatives to .NET Reflector

.NET Reflector is dead, long live ILSpy. Well, .NET Reflector is not really dead, as you might already know, but you now have to pay if you want to use the disassembler. Below we have listed the most common alternatives to the previously popular tool:

1. ILSpy
2. dotPeek
3. JustDecompile
4. Common Compiler Infrastructure
5. Mono Cecil
6. Kaliro
7. Dotnet IL Editor (DILE)

Personally I prefer to use the ILSpy because it is open-source, and works in the similar way as the old .NET reflector.

Source: Coragi.com

.NET: SVG Support

After hours of searching for code for rendering SVG pictures I finally stumbled upon the SVG rendering engine at Codeplex.

The good thing about SVG is that it is supported in most modern browsers. However, SVG is not supported in .NET so you need to find an external library. It seems like Microsoft has focused all their energy on XAML, even though the two formats are very similar.

Fortunately for us the SVG Rendering Engine works more or less out of the box. I had to do some rewriting of the code to make it work with all SVG images. The library is still under development and needs a lot of new features to make it work 100% in accordance with the specifications.