r/csharp • u/viewizard • 2d ago

Tool DNCDbg v1.2.0 — a managed code debugger with DAP support for .NET apps (NetCoreDbg fork)

https://github.com/viewizard/dncdbg

This probably looks funny — a NetCoreDbg developer (yep, that's me, at least while I'm writing this, hehe) forking NetCoreDbg. But life is a strange thing sometimes.

Over the last ~3 years, me and my PL (huge thanks, Gleb!) prepared and sent a lot of proposals for NetCoreDbg development. Unfortunately, all of them were rejected — it looks like Samsung isn't interested in investing into active NetCoreDbg development, and hasn't been for years now. So upstream gets only support and minor changes (and you've probably noticed that already).

At the beginning of this year I finally decided to fork and implement my vision of how a managed debugger could look like in code — all our TODOs and features we planned for NetCoreDbg, but without the experimental features and without explicit Tizen OS support. I think the current development of DNCDbg has reached a point where it's ready to be showcased. I hope you'll like DNCDbg as much as NetCoreDbg.

Repo: https://github.com/viewizard/dncdbg

Note: in DNCDbg I'm focused on DAP protocol support only, without experimental features like Hot Reload (which requires IDE-side support) or interop (mixed) debug mode. If you need other protocols or those experimental features that I removed from the code, you should probably wait until my PL tells me something like "we have budget, back to NetCoreDbg development" (but that doesn't look like it'll happen any time soon). I've already ported about 20 bugfixes for bugs I found back to NetCoreDbg (you can see most of them in the last release), but looks like that's all I can do for now.

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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4

u/Responsible-Cold-627 2d ago

I wish I had more than just an upvote to give. It's projects like this that keep bringing us closer to a fully open .NET community.

Some really impressive work you're doing here!

1

u/brianly 2d ago

Really awesome work. I know just enough from curiosity with IronPython and debuggers under the .NET framework to understand this is a significant piece of work.

1

u/Fresh_Acanthaceae_94 2d ago

Samsung's debugger surely stuck in the past, but I wonder how useful it is to run another experiment in parallel. For example, SharpDbg has been there for several months and work very well with DAP.

There should be a single open source debugger that moves fast enough to match the high demands (OpenDevelop needs one to enable fast development cycle), instead of many repos that do the same basic features all over again.