Debug Builds with xprojs

I recently switched an older project that was using the VS2015 .csproj file to the newer VS2017/“xproj” style file that came about with dotnet. I love the new xproj style files because they are so much cleaner/simpler and they integrate the nuget package information. It’s also fantastic that you can open and edit those files in Visual Studio without have to unload the project. Just update the file and watch as Visual Studio dynamically reloads the interface with the new information. Fantastic!

But, something that I didn’t expect to happen was losing line number information in my stack traces when exceptions occurred. So, it was surprising when our Test environment didn’t return the line numbers of an exception after switching over to the xproj style file.

What was missing?

I didn’t use an auto-conversion tool to do the conversion, so I mistakenly dropped a few important details from the file. The critical piece that dropped was the <DebugSymbols> and <DebugType> flags. The older style csproj file looked like this:

One of the key things in that Conditional is that the BuildConfiguration is named “Int” (rather than “Debug”).

This just needed to be replicated in the new csproj:

As you can see they are pretty much the same.

What if you don’t want to set those values in your .csproj?

When I was trying to figure out what happened, I ran across a really cool piece of functionality that is in the new msbuild system. If you set the BuildConfiguration to “Debug” (instead of “Int”, like I had), it will automatically set the <DebugSymbols> and <DebugType> to values that will produce line numbers in your StackTraces/Exceptions. Very friendly!