Tell Your Code To Debug When You’re Good And Ready!

When doing dev work for the Early Bound Generator I frequently have to kick off a process in the XrmToolBox, and then attempt to attach my debugger as quickly as possible.  This is a really annoying race condition, and if I’m using local metadata, a race that I don’t usually win.  I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before, and for all I know the pattern exists else where in the wild, but it made my “attach to process to debug” workflow a guarantee, rather than a race:

if (ConfigHelper.GetAppSettingOrDefault("WaitForAttachedDebugger", false))
{
    while (!Debugger.IsAttached)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("[**** Waiting For Debugger ****]");
        Thread.Sleep(3000);
    }
}

The ConfigHelper is a helper class in the DLaB.Common that will look for the given AppSettings in the Config file, and if it doesn’t exist, default to the given value (“false” in this case).  So if I add an AppSetting to “WaitForAttachedDebugger” in my config, then my app will wait until a debugger is attached, checking indefinitely every 3 seconds to see if I’ve finally attached it. 

If you found this helpful, make sure to check out, my Raise The Bar video series! 

Happy coding!