Thanks for your ideas Brandorf and fatty. Brandorf's almost gets me to where I wanted to go, but does require that my SL app be capable of running on its own. I really want to have only the one app, which is both wpf and silverlight, with the SL side being debugged.
A long time after I asked this question (I forgot I had asked it here), I actually pieced together a solution that I'm really happy with. I use visual studio automation within the WPF/.NET side of my app, to find all running instances of visual studio, figure out which one produced my exe (since it typically sits in a folder below the vcproj/sln folder), and then use visual studio automation to have that VS attach to the app, debugging silverlight code. After this is done, I then load my silverlight content.
It works really well. You end up with an app that goes and finds a debugger to attach to itself every time it runs (so you probably want this code only in a debug build, or somehow able to be turned off). So you just launch the app with ctrl-F5 (launch without debugging) from visual studio whenever you want to debug the silverlight side.
Here's my code:
#if DEBUG
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.IO;
namespace Launcher
{
//The core methods in this class to find all running instances of VS are
//taken/inspired from
//http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/automatingvisualstudio.aspx
class DebuggingAutomation
{
[DllImport("ole32.dll")]
private static extern int GetRunningObjectTable(int reserved,
out UCOMIRunningObjectTable prot);
[DllImport("ole32.dll")]
private static extern int CreateBindCtx(int reserved,
out UCOMIBindCtx ppbc);
///<summary>
///Get a snapshot of the running object table (ROT).
///</summary>
///<returns>
///A hashtable mapping the name of the object
///in the ROT to the corresponding object
///</returns>
private static Hashtable GetRunningObjectTable()
{
Hashtable result = new Hashtable();
int numFetched;
UCOMIRunningObjectTable runningObjectTable;
UCOMIEnumMoniker monikerEnumerator;
UCOMIMoniker[] monikers = new UCOMIMoniker[1];
GetRunningObjectTable(0, out runningObjectTable);
runningObjectTable.EnumRunning(out monikerEnumerator);
monikerEnumerator.Reset();
while (monikerEnumerator.Next(1, monikers, out numFetched) == 0)
{
UCOMIBindCtx ctx;
CreateBindCtx(0, out ctx);
string runningObjectName;
monikers[0].GetDisplayName(ctx, null, out runningObjectName);
object runningObjectVal;
runningObjectTable.GetObject(monikers[0], out runningObjectVal);
result[runningObjectName] = runningObjectVal;
}
return result;
}
/// <summary>
/// Get a table of the currently running instances of the Visual Studio .NET IDE.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="openSolutionsOnly">
/// Only return instances that have opened a solution
/// </param>
/// <returns>
/// A list of the ides (as DTE objects) present in
/// in the running object table to the corresponding DTE object
/// </returns>
private static List<EnvDTE.DTE> GetIDEInstances(bool openSolutionsOnly)
{
var runningIDEInstances = new List<EnvDTE.DTE>();
Hashtable runningObjects = GetRunningObjectTable();
IDictionaryEnumerator rotEnumerator = runningObjects.GetEnumerator();
while (rotEnumerator.MoveNext())
{
string candidateName = (string)rotEnumerator.Key;
if (!candidateName.StartsWith("!VisualStudio.DTE"))
continue;
EnvDTE.DTE ide = rotEnumerator.Value as EnvDTE.DTE;
if (ide == null)
continue;
if (openSolutionsOnly)
{
try
{
string solutionFile = ide.Solution.FullName;
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(solutionFile))
{
runningIDEInstances.Add(ide);
}
}
catch { }
}
else
{
runningIDEInstances.Add(ide);
}
}
return runningIDEInstances;
}
internal static void AttachDebuggerIfPossible()
{
if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
{
//Probably debugging host (Desktop .NET side), so don't try to attach to silverlight side
return;
}
var ides = GetIDEInstances(true);
var fullPathToAssembly = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location;
var potentials = new List<EnvDTE.DTE>();
foreach (var ide in ides)
{
var solutionPath = ide.Solution.FullName;
var topLevelSolutionDir = Path.GetDirectoryName(solutionPath);
var assemblyName = fullPathToAssembly;
if (assemblyName.StartsWith(topLevelSolutionDir, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
potentials.Add(ide);
}
}
EnvDTE.DTE chosenIde = null;
//If you have multiple ides open that can match your exe, you can come up with a scheme to pick a particular one
//(eg, put a file like solution.sln.pickme next to the solution whose ide you want to debug). If this is not a
//concern, just pick the first match.
if (potentials.Count > 0)
{
chosenIde = potentials[0];
}
var dbg = chosenIde != null ? (EnvDTE80.Debugger2)chosenIde.Debugger : null;
if (dbg != null)
{
var trans = dbg.Transports.Item("Default");
var proc = (EnvDTE80.Process2)dbg.GetProcesses(trans, System.Environment.MachineName).Item(Path.GetFileName(fullPathToAssembly));
var engines = new EnvDTE80.Engine[1];
engines[0] = trans.Engines.Item("Silverlight");
proc.Attach2(engines);
}
}
}
}
#endif
