How to break WinDbg in an anonymous method?

Posted by Richard Berg on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Richard Berg
Published on 2010-03-12T06:33:15Z Indexed on 2010/03/12 6:37 UTC
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Title kinda says it all. The usual SOS command !bpmd doesn't do a lot of good without a name.

Some ideas I had:

  • dump every method, then use !bpmd -md when you find the corresponding MethodDesc
    • not practical in real world usage, from what I can tell. Even if I wrote a macro to limit the dump to anonymous types/methods, there's no obvious way to tell them apart.
  • use Reflector to dump the MSIL name
    • doesn't help when dealing with dynamic assemblies and/or Reflection.Emit. Visual Studio's inability to read local vars inside such scenarios is the whole reason I turned to Windbg in the first place...
  • set the breakpoint in VS, wait for it to hit, then change to Windbg using the noninvasive trick
    • attempting to detach from VS causes it to hang (along with the app). I think this is due to the fact that the managed debugger is a "soft" debugger via thread injection instead of a standard "hard" debugger. Or maybe it's just a VS bug specific to Silverlight (would hardly be the first I've encountered).
  • set a breakpoint on some other location known to call into the anonymous method, then single-step your way in
    • my backup plan, though I'd rather not resort to it if this Q&A reveals a better way

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