CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netvisual-studiovisual-studio-2015nuget
evilkos
evilkos

Reputation: 597

How to see source code from github in Visual Studio IDE, but compile with dlls from Nuget?

Nowadays there's a lot of great open source packages and frameworks for all sorts of uses. Let's take for example, ASP.NET Core MVC and Newtonsoft.Json. Those are shipped in Nuget packages, which are stripped of the source code. I think many of you can remember a lot of situations in which one would like to see the source code freely available on GitHub (to help debugguing some issue), but was forced to do one of the following:

  1. Be lazy and just forget about it, or continue debugging your issue with a popular library treating it more like a "black box";
  2. Go to the browser, type github.com and search the source code without the mighty advises of the Visual Studio IDE;
  3. Spend 5 minutes, clone the repository to the local drive and look at it with IDE;
  4. Spend even more time while compiling the source code, deinstalling all of the nuget packages of interest from your projects and instead, hooking up directly to all of the freshly compiled assemblies (which are not always one-to-one to Nuget package).

This last option is the most viable, but you're left with a lot of time spent and you can't just push this to your repository or deploy the compiled code anymore. Other developers won't find those relative paths to the dlls and customers may end up with wrong versions of nuget packages baked in the deployment package.

Is there a fifth option which has all the pros of the fourth, but none of the cons? I imagine this being done by an IDE in an isolated fasion, i.e. no modification to my .csproj and package.config files, but the "Go to definition" & "Find all references" features and debugging should work as if I'm hooked up to the real stuff.

Yes, I'm pretty lazy.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1311

Answers (2)

watashiSHUN
watashiSHUN

Reputation: 10484

as mentioned in one of the comments, there is a VS extension that does this: Nuget Reference Switcher (select one that matches your VS version to install), for more info, you can read its wiki on github.

here is what I usually do:

  1. git clone the source repository

  2. add the open sourced .sln/.csproj to your own solution:

    enter image description here

  3. run nuget reference switcher extension

This is equivalent to your step 4, but a lot less work since the heavy lifting is done by the extension.

Upvotes: 1

Weiwei
Weiwei

Reputation: 3766

Please pack the package as symbols package and then put the PackageName.Symbols.nupkg file with the ProjectName.nupkg file on the same package server after you downloading the package source code. I’m using following steps to debug my NuGet package source code in Visual Studio IDE.

  1. Create my NuGet package project and implement the function that I want. In your situation, you just need to download the package source code from Github.com.
  2. Build the project in your Visual Studio IDE, it will general a dll file and a pdb file in bin\Debug folder.
  3. Download NuGet.exe and run this command to pack the source code project to package:

NuGet Pack MyProject.csproj -Symbols

  1. There will generate two files, one is ProjectName.symbols.nupkg and another is ProjectName.nupkg. Upload these files to your NuGet Server. And you also can put them on your local driver.
  2. Add your NuGet Server into your Visual Studio IDE through Tools -> Options -> Package Manager Console -> Package Source.
  3. Open your project and install the package from the added package source.
  4. Right-click your solution, choose Properties -> Common properties -> Debug Source Files, add the path where the PackageName.Symbols.nupkg file with the ProjectName.nupkg file stored on your local machine.

Now when your start debug your project and press F11 step into one function in your installed package, it will step into then package source code.

Upvotes: 2

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