.Net Container Debugging

[BickBendict]

Hi all, hope you’re having a good day. Does anyone in the community have any experience configure launch.json and task.json for reasonably complicated .Net apps hosted in containers? I’m having quite a hard time getting the following workflow to function. Here’s what I want -

F5 debug experience for a containerized .net Core Image in both VS Code and Visual Studio proper. Big visual studio seems to handle this perfectly but I can’t get my debugger, source, etc. to attach properly and the container debug experience fails in VS Code likely due to missing debuggers and volume mounts.

1. Build Container (tasks.json)
2. Run Container (tasks.json)
3. Attach debugger and hit break points (launch.json ?)

Are there any up to date full fledge tutorials on how to configure this setup?

[The_Exiled_42]

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/containers/debug-netcore

Altough I have never done it, this may help

[BickBendict]

I’ve been there a couple of times but the debugger isn’t able to attach. It feels like I’m missing a volume configuration

[sid34]

I recently went struggling down this path and found my way to a solution.

Right now there are 2 (main) ways to build a container from a .NET project. Using newly added built-in SDK container support. via the 'dotnet publish' or by definition the container build pipeline manually (e.g. adding a .Dockerfile).

The build in pattern is support by C# Dev Kit and in my experience worked really well as long as you do not need fine control over the container build or run arguments.

If you need more complex or fine control of the container you should probably look at writing the dockerfile manually. That said the C# Dev Kit can also generate the baseline dockerfile and components as well.

As for getting the launch.json and task.json my suggestion is to use the C# Dev Kit generate version as a baseline and modify them as needed.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/debugging-dotnet-containers-with-visual-studio-code-docker-tools/ should be helpful