It took more work than I expected, but I’ve published my template for debugging the XNA Content Pipeline in XNA Game Studio 4.0.
To install and use the template, right-click on the solution node of a solution where you have an XNA Content project to debug, and select Add—>New Project… Then, in the Add New Project dialog, click Online Templates on the left-hand-side, and type “debugging” in the search box in the upper-right corner.
Select the XNA Content Pipeline Debugging template, and it will start the install wizard. The template is released under the Microsoft Public License. (When I submitted to the VS Gallery, I discovered that all submitted templates must be licensed under the Ms-PL.) If you don’t agree to the license, do not install or use the software.
After creating the project, there are two string constants that you must edit before you begin debugging. They are marked with comments, but I’ll describe it here as well.
Replace the highlighted value of this first field with the full path of the content project you want to debug:
private const string ProjectToDebug = @”TODO_FullProjectPathGoesHere“;
Then replace the highlighted value of this second field with the relative path of the item you want to debug. The path should be relative to the content project, so that it matches the item name in that project.
private const string SingleItem = @”TODO_RelativeItemPathGoesHere“;
Now when you want to debug, you set the DebugPipeline project to be the startup project and press F5. Or, even better, just right-click on the DebugPipeline project and select Debug—>Start new instance.
By default, this project is configured to build content for Windows using the Debug configuration and the HiDef graphics profile. These settings will be apparent in the Program.cs file where you can change them to meet your needs.
Changing the graphics profile to Reach is easy, and you might need to do this if your content project is part of a Windows Phone game.
HOWEVER, for now please don’t change the TargetPlatform (I just discovered a bug as I’m writing this… Damn!). I’ll update the template tomorrow to fix the problem.
If you have feedback or questions about the template, or want to review screenshots before downloading, follow this link to the template description page in the Visual Studio Gallery:
The link above has a discussion page.
I’ve updated the template with a fix (version 1.6). If you’ve already downloaded it, you can get the update via the Add New Project dialog, Extension Manager dialog, or by going to the Visual Studio Gallery web site.
You do realize that you can always put a Debugger.Launch() into your custom importer and debug it right away? If so, what’s the benefit of your approach?
Is that how you debug your games and other software? Do you rebuild your binaries each time you want to enable or disable debugging, or when you want to debug a different component? Or do you use breakpoints and launch it under the debugger?
This template lets you isolate the content build process to include only the item you’re interested in debugging, and you don’t need to rebuild your pipeline extensions before you start, after you’re done, or when you want to debug a different item. It doesn’t invalidate any of your already-built content, so you can inspect your code with the debugger without forcing a rebuild of all the content before going back to debugging your game.
By launching the build under the debugger, you can use Visual Studio’s “Break on Exception” features to find the failure points without setting a breakpoint at all. (And when you use this feature, you don’t get the noise of exceptions from other Visual Studio threads, because you’re not attached to Visual Studio.)
If you use Debugger.Break and build from the VS IDE, then you can’t debug your content pipeline components with that same instance of the VS IDE (because the process that is stopped by Debugger.Break is the VS IDE). That means you have to load your solution in another instance to get the same debugging experience (source code navigation, etc).
Another important advantage is that this template works with every installation of XNA Game Studio 4.0. Debugger.Break only works with a just-in-time (JIT) debugger, which isn’t included in any of the Express editions. So to use it with an Express edition, you need to first install the Windows SDK (which includes the .NET Framework 4.0 SDK).
The point of this template is to enable a better debugging experience.
I always just launched another visual studio and used Attach To Process to attach to the visual studio that would do the building. This will probably make debugging a much smoother process, thank you.
Works great and I agree rebuilding to debug is not the way to go through development, especially when I feel I spend about 80% of my development in the content pipeline. Now I can remove the 10 or so commented out Debugger.Launch() ‘s in there. Thanks man!
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Great, works with the Express edition, Thank you
Thanks for this, it’s really helpful. On a related subject, I’m having a trouble attempting to debug a custom MSBuild task (using VS2010 Express).
Will Debugger.Launch() work from a custom task once I install the Windows SDK, or is there a more elegant solution similar to what you’ve done here?
Aranda, the method used in this template can be applied to any code executed by MSBuild. Look at the Main function in the project, and you’ll see code that loads an MSBuild project and executes the build engine on it. To debug your custom task, write a console application (like the one in my pipeline debugging template) that loads your project and builds it. Then debug that console application to easily debug your custom task.
Awesome, works like a charm. Seems obvious now that you mention it.
A bit late to the thread, but thanks for this very helpful extension.
I’m sorry,
I’m a bit thick, I’ve followed these instructions but don’t seem to understand, how can I use it to debug the content pipeline? Does this allow me to set breakpoints and inspect data inside the content Processor? I seem to get the same exact exception and no additional data or functionality using this method.
What I was hoping to be able to do is, inside of my CustomContentProcessor, I’m parsing some .xml but I’m getting a Input string was not in the correct format error. I’d like to print the xml node that is causing this error to the output window with something like System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(xmlNode);
but obviously this does nothing in the content processor. I thought I might be getting something like that functionality from this method you’ve developed here, but I’m lost how to actually use it. I am extremely N00B at debbuging, so I appologize if this is something super simple.
Any additional help would be much appreciated!
Thanks.
Yes, that’s exactly what this is for. I’m not sure where your understanding has broken down. You’re either debugging the process that builds your content or you’re not.
When you “start debugging” with an XNA game project, it builds first, then launches the game under the debugger. The process you’re debugging is the game, and all the content build has already occurred. If you have custom processors or importers that execute during the build, and you want to debug those, then my template lets you do that pretty easily. It creates a project with code that just compiles your content, using whichever importers and processors you’ve already conifgured. When you debug that program, then you have a chance to debug your custom processors.
If your content build was failing with an exception, you should expect it to continue to fail when you debug it. That’s what you want. Nothing should change, but because you’ve got the debugger attached, you can stop the program at the exception and examine the call stack, etc., which lets you diagnose the problem. You can also set breakpoints. If you’re not reaching breakpoints in your code, perhaps the exception is occurring before execution reaches that point. You should change your debug settings to turn off “just my code” and then set the debugger to break on all exceptions. Examine the exception object to learn more about the problem and when it’s occurring.
Very nice solution! In my opinion Microsoft should develop some method for easily debugging content, since that is where a lot of errors can arise, especially when dealing with custom content. I prefer this solution over others that I have found for its ability to keep my code clean, without needing to call any methods that should not be in there in the final build.
Thank you for this
I was about to post an issue where it didn’t work for me, and of course it magically worked right as I was typing it…
This should prove to be a tremendous time-safer when creating new processors, Debugger.Launch() takes a lot of time and is very sub-optimal, especially compared to this.
Thanks for providing this! Worked first time for me and helped me track down a bug in less time than it took for VS to install the template.