Troubleshooting Symbol Loading Issues - Visual Studio 2019 - Step Into no longer working

Question

Quite suddenly no symbols are loading correctly for my UWP project in Visual Studio. When I establish a breakpoint, then press Step Into, every time it says that the appropriate symbol is not loaded.

Previously, this was working fine and did not throw these symbol load errors so it seems I must have messed something up but have no clue as to what.

I recently modified my UWP application to include a full trust helper.

I know this is quite vague but wondering where I should start when troubleshooting this kind of issue?

So far I have:

• Restarted my machine
• Rebuilt my project
• Deleted OBJ and BIN folder in explorer
• Deleted visual studio temporary memory

Any ideas as to what I should look into?

Answer 1

The build configuration of the solution or some of your projects within may have changed at some point, it's normally what catches me out.

Build Configuration:

Open Build \ Configuration Manager and check the project you're expecting symbols from is set to a debug based configuration. Symbols are not included in release builds by default.

Project Configuration:

Open Project \ {ProjectName} Properties \ Build \ Output \ Advanced... and ensure that debugging information is not set to 'None' ('Pdb-only' or 'Portable' is fine)

Note: I don't have the reputation to post this as a comment yet, sorry!

Answer 2

You could check the following steps to do this.

1. Right click project-> Properties -> Build -> Advanced ->Set Debugging information to Full
2. Select Tools -> Import and Exprot settings -> Reset all settings
3. When debugging, open Debug -> Windows -> Modules . You could right click.dll -> Symbol Load information , check if the pdf file exists. If it contains "cannot find or open the pdb file" error message, you could right click on the.dll and select Load Symbols , browse to the directory containing the corresponding.pdb file.