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Is there any IL level debugger in form of a VS plugin or standalone application?
Visual studio’s debugger is great, but it allows you to debug on either HLL code level or assembly language, you can’t debug IL. It seems that in some situations it would be useful to have an opportunity to debug at IL level.
In particular it might be helpful when debugging a problem in the code that you don't have the source of.
It is arguable if it is actually useful to debug IL when you don't have the source, but anyway.
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To use Visual Studio to debug a deployed application, you must attach to the ASP.NET worker process and make sure that the debugger has access to symbols for the application. You must also locate and open the source files for the application. For more information, see Specify Symbol (.
In the Visual Studio toolbar, make sure the configuration is set to Debug, and either IIS Express, or the new IIS profile name, appears in the emulator field. To start debugging, select IIS Express or <IIS profile name> in the toolbar, select Start Debugging from the Debug menu, or press F5.
To enable the Disassembly window, under Tools > Options > Debugging, select Enable address-level debugging. To open the Disassembly window during debugging, select Windows > Disassembly or press Alt+8.
To do this, go to the Modules window and from the context menu of a . NET assembly, and then select the Decompile source code command. Visual Studio generates a symbol file for the assembly and then embeds the source into the symbol file. In a later step, you can extract the embedded source code.
The best way to do this is to use ILDASM to disassemble the managed binary, which will generate the IL instructions. Then recompile that IL source code in debug mode using ILASM, when you fire up the Visual Studio debugger you will be able to step through the raw IL.
ildasm foo.exe /OUT=foo.exe.il /SOURCEilasm foo.exe.il /DEBUGI've written a blog post about this topic at: How to debug Compiler Generated code.
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