How am I supposed to be building NuGet packages?

Question

I have a few functions I want to make available to many projects I'm working on. So naturally I thought I should make a NuGet package to contain the shared code. so I:

1. Created a class library (in this case called ADUserCacheUsage).
2. Fixed the Assembly Info for that class library.
3. went to the directory with ADUserCacheUsage.csproj , and in a command window did nuget spec . This generated a .nuspec file.
4. Fixed that nuspec file for my project.
5. nuget pack ADUserCacheUsage.csproj -Build -Symbols -Properties Configuration=Release (after all, if someone externally is using the package, they only need the release build, right?)
6. nuget add ADUserCacheUsage.1.0.0.nupkg -source "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft SDKs\\NuGetPackages"

So great, my NuGet package shows up when I select the machine source in the package manager. So I can use it in my projects.

I'm making a sample web page to use it. All the sample does is call one function and output the result on a web page.

The problem is, whenever I try and run this sample project in debug mode, I get the warning message

You are debugging a Release build of ADUserCacheUsage.dll.

So presumably I should be including a debug version of my class library in my package, in addition to the release version, right? I wouldn't want the final release of the sample project to bother with the debugging information, potentially being slow and bloated (admittedly not much of an issue on a project that's just a sample, but I'm thinking for best practices and in the future where I might have a larger, more complex package).

But I want to be able to run in debug without this error. Whenever I make a web project, it includes many other projects, and it never gives me this error with regard to, for example, NewtonSoft.json . So what should I be doing in order to do this the right way? Does every package on nuget.org just include the debug version?

Answer 1

NuGet packages don't contain debug information.

Instead, there are separate NuGet symbol packages (ending with .symbols.nupkg ) that contain debug symbols ( .pdb files) and the source code files. Symbol packages can be created using either the nuget pack -Symbols or dotnet pack --include-symbols command tools.

After the symbols packages are created and hosted (either on a symbol server or on the local file system), you can configure Visual Studio to use them to step through the code, even though the code in the NuGet package was built using Release mode.