Debugger not debugging some variables correctly

[vsfeedback]

This issue has been moved from a ticket on Developer Community.

---

Testing with a MAUI RC2 project in VS4Mac 2022 Preview (build 8754)

Simply in the MainPage class I am trying to debug the result of bleService.GetPlatform(). This should be a string of android, ios or windows.

If I hover over this variable to have the IDE tell me what it is it says it is null. This is also confirmed in the locals pane. However when I output the variable (as I do in the line above) I can see from the output panel that the variable is ios as expected.

Screenshot of it not working:

Sample project I was using.
OpenOWDiag.zip

In this sample I was targeting a macOS build. In this specific case I am expecting my result to be ios even though this is macOS. However I don’t expect this to be the cause of the problem. I also tested to iOS simulator (I did need to delete iOS/BLEService.cs to build). Debugging on an Android phone worked as expected.

---

Original Comments

Feedback Bot on 5/7/2022, 02:04 AM:

(private comment, text removed)

---

Original Solutions

(no solutions)

[beeradmoore]

I don't know why this was moved here, I thought it was a IDE bug but I guess not.

That missing screenshot is this:

[PureWeen]

@mauroa

[drasticactions]

I would be surprised if this was specific to MAUI. It really does feel like a Platform bug. We should be able to reproduce this in a new iOS or Android app and just break in there.

[beeradmoore]

I tried to repro it with new Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac projects and it works fine. However these projects are not running net6.0-ios and net6.0-maccatalyst. I don't know if we can make dedicated iOS and macOS projects that target these to try repro it that way.

WillItDebugiOS.zip

WillItDebugMacOS.zip

[drasticactions]

@beeradmoore You can create net6.0-ios and net6.0-maccatalyst apps separately of MAUI. They should appear in the Visual Studio template list, or you can make them in CLI with

dotnet new ios or dotnet new maccatalyst

You may need to install the workloads for them with dotnet workload install ios maccatalyst

Edit: Actually, remembering that this is VSMac here, those new templates only appear in VSMac 17.3 P1, which should be out soon. You will need to create the project through CLI, but it should still load in the IDE.

[beeradmoore]

I re-did the test with dotnet new , and I also changed MyService to be a partial class made up of files from 2 files. Unable to reproduce with it.

WillItDebugiOSNet6.zip

WillItDebugMacOSNet6.zip

EDIT: I tried making a folder and putting MyServicePartial2.cs into it but it did not repro. I then tried naming both of my service files to MyService.cs and I could not repro.

Not sure exactly what else to test, Folder1/Folder2/MyService.cs and ignore MyFolder1/ but include **/Folder2/MyService.cs

[beeradmoore]

Just quietly bumping this and confirming with latest MAUI and VS Preview that shipped today (both GA) this is still broken. Is there any way we can either confirm its a MAUI problem so it can be handled at some point or reject that theory and send it back to the IDE (or dotnet) team?

I don't want it to sit here with issue rot and not getting looked at when the people who need to look at it are unaware that the problem exists all while its impacting development. It's already hard enough to develop MAUI apps when I need to use application output to debug but the text size of that panel can't change and is unreadable.

EDIT: (5 hours after original comment)
I thought this was a problem with dependency services or something as demonstrated above. But in this example I am using Path.Combine and it is allegedly null unless you output it.

[edgedj]

I was kindly pointed here by another user, I've found this problem to occur with number of object types as well as string. What's slightly odd is that some objects appear to have non null values when debugging and some don't - I can't spot a pattern yet. I'm going to check out the same solution on my windows laptop and see if the same problem exists there. The ref for my issue is #7647

[beeradmoore]

I have found something to add. Class variables work, member level variables do not. I guess until this can get fixed everything is going to be private class variable -_-

In this case I moved dirs outside of my constructor in order to debug it.

[edgedj]

good spot, yes if I move my variable up to a class variable I can now see the contents when debugging. At least there is a workaround for now, thank you