ASP.NET Core 3.0 - how to attach the Visual Studio debugger?

Question

I have two Asp.Net Core projects - one is version 2.2. and one is version 3.0.

Each project is a brand new, empty MVC project created in Visual Studio.

I run each project by dropping to the command line and doing dotnet run.

I then debug my code as follows:

1. Open Task Manager and find the process Id for the dotnet process
2. Doing Debug -> Attach to Process in Visual Studio 2019

For the version 2.2 project, I can easily identify the correct dotnet process in Task Manager - it's the one showing the dotnet exec command pointing to my project's .dll file:

However - for the 3.0 project, the dotnet processes in Task Manager look like this:

None of the processes is clearly associated with my project's .dll files, and none of them allows me to debug my code using Attach to Process.

So my question is - is there a way of attaching Visual Studio's debugger to an Asp.Net Core 3.0 project when I run it using dotnet run ?

Answer 1

I had the same issue after upgrading a ASP.NET Core 2.2 project to ASP.NET Core 3.0. I have used a trick to find out the process I should attach to whenever needed:

• Run with Debug (F5)
• Attach to Process
• Find the process which is grayed out (already attached). This is the process that should be used to further process attachments

In my case the process was called {AssemblyName}.exe.

Side note: You can find Reattach extension particularly useful for quickly reattaching (e.g. Ctrl-R Ctrl-1) to previous processes.

Answer 2

Turns out that the Asp.Net Core 3.0 project, when run using dotnet run, has a different entry in Task Manager than 2.2 - the .exe file produced by the build is what is displayed in Task Manager's details, and I can successfully attach to this process in Visual Studio: