Silverlight Debugging: Using Debugging Tools for Windows
In my book Advanced .NET Debugging, I discuss at great length the internals of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) as well as the tools available to efficiently debug issues in .NET applications. A very common question that I get is whether the same techniques and tools can be applied when debugging Silverlight applications. Fortunately, the answer is absolutely, and most all of the techniques and tools described in Advanced .NET Debugging apply equally to Silverlight debugging[md]with a few caveats. In this article, I explain what those caveats are and how you can leverage the information in Advanced .NET Debugging to debug Silverlight applications.
Prerequisites
In order to run and debug Silverlight applications, the Silverlight runtime must be installed on the computer. In this article, I will use Silverlight version 3.0, which can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight.
Additionally, to enable debugging of Silverlight applications using the Debugging Tools for Windows, the developer runtime also has to be installed from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=150228.
If you want to build the sample application associated with this article, you will also need the Silverlight SDK.
Finally, the Debugging Tools for Windows package can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.
All the source code and binaries used in this article can be found here.