debug a dotnet core program in terminal

Question

I’ve recently setup omnisharp with nvim and wanted to try to develope a dotnet core application without the help of VS/rider/vs code.

Now i tried to google around but couldn’t find any real way to debug dotnet core applications from terminal.

What’s the correct way to debug one?

Solution

Unfortunately, this is going to be a very painful experience. There's no real command line debugger available for .NET Core.

However, CoreCLR developers use a plugin for lldb (on *nix) that teaches lldb about a number of commands that it can use to help debug .NET code.

Essentially:

lldb /path/to/dotnet/dotnet
plugin load /path/to/dotnet/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App/*/libsosplugin.so
b SystemNative_ReceiveMessage
r run
clrstack

Further documentation:

• A tutorial: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/premier_developer/2017/05/02/debugging-net-core-with-sos-everywhere/
• General setup instructions: https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/building/debugging-instructions.md
• List of commands: https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/src/ToolBox/SOS/Strike/sosdocsunix.txt

If you start using it, you will quickly realize how painful this is. It's almost worth using VS/Rider/VSCode just for the debugger, sadly.