无法调试Excel加载项

Question

I have created a plugin project, where this is a plugin to MS Excel. I also has some C++ code written and it is written in VS 2008, and i am using 2010. And this causes on the Excel sheet open and i cant find the plugins visible in the debug mode. But when i install the Setup i see all the features and plugin also visible.

I some times get an error

Debugging information for EXECEL.EXE could not be found or does not match. Cannot find or open the PDB file.

and also this

Debugging information for EXECEL.EXE could not be found or does not match. Exports are loaded.

Please someone help me in this as i am new to this, doing from the scratch.

i am using VS2010 c# winforms

Answer 1

The error message is saying that you don't have the PDBs (files that contain debugging information for an executable) for Excel.exe. This makes sense, since Microsoft does not publish them.

If you set breakpoints in your addin, they should work fine as you use Excel to run the code in your addin. Depending on how Excel addins work, they might not be loaded into the process until they are used, so even if Visual Studio says that it can't set the breakpoint initially because the DLL isn't loaded, that's ok - as soon as you do something in Excel that requires your addin, it should be loaded and then Visual Studio will set the breakpoint.

When you attach to Excel, make sure to select managed debugging (.NET 4 in this case, based on the tags on your question). If you select automatic, Visual Studio will probably only enable unmanaged debugging which won't allow you to debug your C# addin.