Last week we covered how to Create an Application with Web Template Studio and now that we have an application we are going to work through how to debug the ASP.NET Core back-end.
Sample Application
The sample application used in this post has been expanded from what we used last week to include two instances of each page type provided by Web Template Studio. The gird, list, and master/detail page types trigger controllers to be added to our back-end application which will give us something to work with. To add these extra page types you have to run through the full wizard in Web Template Studio and not use the create project button on the first page of the wizard. The following is a screenshot of the new sample application with the extra page types.
Debugging in VSCode
Our goal in this post is going to be to hit a breakpoint in the controller action that returns the data for the gird page in the screenshot above. Looking through the project under server/Controllers it looks pretty likely that we are interested in the GridController. This controller only has one action so click to the left of the line number for the line that has the return statement for the Get function.
Unlike the post from last week to debug the back-end we need to run it separate from the front-end which means we need to move away from using npm start to run the whole application. Use the following command to start just the front-end.
npm start-frontend
Now to run the back-end goto the Run section in VSCode and then click the Play button to run the back-end using the .NET Core Launch (web) profile.
This will launch a blank page which we don’t need and it can be closed. If the blank page bothers you too much it can be changed in the launch profile. Now that our back-end is running use the front-end to navigate to the Grid page.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, with the above steps, you are ready to debug the back-end part of your application. I’m betting for most of us running the front-end and back-end separately is going to more closely match how we normally work. For more information on debugging in VSCode check out the official doc.
Also published on Medium.