Placing breakpoints in DLL's Visual Studio instance and breaking in .exe's*

Question

Situation:

I'm developing a set of DLL libraries and am separately using them in a project where I test them. I often need to break at a faulty point, but while usually I anyway get an exception and VS finds the source file for me and the right spot, allowing me to break there, there are occasions when there's no error but unwanted results, so I need to peek inside and look at the actual data I could of course start navigating through to that point from debug mode in the .exe's solution, but it's buried a few function calls deep and I'll probably end up with 5-6 more files open than I need, plus the time of finding it. Question:

Is there any way to make one instance of VS break at a specific point via a breakpoint in another instance? Given that they both see the same .pdb file for debugging info within the DLL, I would imagine they could also share such info, but apparently not(?). I do recall seeing a question about skipping breakpoints in DLLs so I imagine there is something doable.

current alternative:

So far I'm limited to purposefully inject faulty bits of code to make the second instance open the file at the right point, usually a division by zero does the trick, but it's still a little back-and-forth. Note that it's VS2010 right now, though I imagine they haven't changes something concerning this in the subsequent versions.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can use this:

Debugger.Break();

it signals a breakpoint to an attached debugger. Just put it in a library you want to debug, start your program and it will stop on this line.