Using or license vsdbg outside of VSCode

[danwalmsley]

Hi,

Quick question, iv noticed a fairly well known company that is developing .net ide are using your clrdbg.exe.

I run an open source project AvalonStudio (https://github.com/VitalElement/AvalonStudio/) which is mainly for c/c++ but we have started to add c# and .net support. We had a look at clrdbg and notice it prints a message to say its not available for use outside vscode, xamarin studio or visual studio.

which is why we haven't used it.

We are interested if like the company that are using it, we could get permission to use it also (we are not a company or profitable organization).

I spoke to some of the omnisharp guys and they told me @gregg-miskelly might be able to help me?

Thanks in advance for any information

[DustinCampbell]

To be clear, the "omnisharp guys" was me. 😄 That said, while I work for Microsoft, I'm not on the debugger team, so I recommended that @danwalmsley touch base with you.

[gregg-miskelly]

@danwalmsley your question is a good one, but it is above my pay grade :). I will forward it along to others to see what can be done. However, lots of people are on vacation, so it may be a little while before they respond. But if no one gets back to you by ~January 6th, please ping me.

[andysterland]

hi there @danwalmsley, you’re correct that the terms of clrdbg don't allow use outside of VS, VS Code, and Xamarin Studio. I’m not familiar with Avalon Studio, so if you have some time for a call it would be great to understand more about the project and where you want to go with it. You can find time on my calendar at https://calendly.com/andster. Thanks!

[danwalmsley]

@andysterland Thanks, that will be great I will book that in :)

How will we communicate skype?

Avalon Studio is an open source IDE project I have been running for a couple of years. More info here, but I will be happy to tell you all about it and where I want to take the project,
https://github.com/VitalElement/AvalonStudio/

[DustinCampbell]

Did conversation already happen? Do we still need this issue or can it be closed?

[dasMulli]

Apparently, JetBrains Rider also hit the license issue and removed CoreCLR debugging: https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/02/15/rider-eap-17-nuget-unit-testing-build-debugging/

[danwalmsley]

@DustinCampbell yes, but still awaiting to hear back.

In case the internal discussion is going on, it might be worth pointing out that
apples swift language they have https://github.com/apple/swift-lldb

open lldb debugger support. This is something that arguably should be part of c# community.

[vintzl]

@andysterland
More than 2 years later, can you provide us any news?

[Rom1deTroyes]

This morning, I wanted to edit some dotnet/Blazor code to lean how to develop an UI application for a python API I'm working on.

As a vim user on GNU/Linux (I use #neovim BTW), I started to search for an LSP and a debugger, and... well, now I'm here.

Any fresh news ?

Does the M.I.T. license applied to the code in this repo is enough to build the extension, and use it in an other editor, or does the /RuntimeLicenses/ forbids that usage ?

[gregg-miskelly]

Two notes in case these are useful:

• Blazor-wasm debugging is not based on vsdbg. I am not familiar enough with the scenario to comment deeply on what is or is not possible. But I can say that if this is the type of code you are trying to debug then this issue doesn't apply.
• All of the source code in this repo is under an MIT license. The runtime license only governs the built VS Code extension as that is what includes vsdbg.

[616b2f]

Why even bother just use: https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg it speaks the same protocol (DAP) so if they ever decide to make vsdbg open for anyone then you just switch the binary and it's done, till then use "netcoredbg" it's pretty stable and I had never issues with it.

[Rom1deTroyes]

* All of the source code in this repo is under an MIT license. The runtime license only governs the built VS Code extension as that is what includes vsdbg.

Nice disambiguation, thanx 🥇 : that was what I expected, but I was unsure of my comprehension.

* Blazor-wasm debugging is not based on vsdbg. I am not familiar enough with the scenario to comment deeply on what is or is not possible.

I'm not familiar enough with all the dotnet ecosystem to know what goes in which category, but working with spaghetti code, I put breakpoints all over the place and observe what is going on for now :-)

Why even bother just use: [...] "netcoredbg" it's pretty stable and I had never issues with it.

That is the one proposed by my LSP manager for .Net and C# so it is the one I use at the moment, without issue 👍

[lawrence-laz]

I just want to emphasise that even though netcoredbg is a valid workaround for now, the need for vsdbg outside of VS ecosystems is still very much desired. 🙏

Anyone who has debugged reflection heavy code or used some more complex expressions must have hit the limits of netcoredbg most probably in a form of SyntaxKindNotImplementedException.

C# and .NET are great, but for someone who use non-VS-family editors it can get pretty uncomfortable and the most disheartening part is that the solution is right here, but cannot be used due to some arbitrary fence.

[Santas]

I want to use Cursor, because VS Code Copilot is not so great. Why does MS want to make me less productive and go through workarounds to develop in .NET? If you want money for it, make a paid plugin, but don't cripple other IDEs. By using a more productive environment, our app can get more users which ends up in increased licensing costs of MSSQL/WinServer/Azure/...

While MS tries to make it sound like .NET is fully crossplatform, it is not hard to find out the limits and see that MS still tries to push you to develop on Windows and in Visual Studio. .NET hot reload is worse on Mac than in Win VS, running MSSQL in Docker is pain, ... which makes you reconsider those tens of thousands of $$$ you pay for the licenses.

[shpsyte]

this is so annoying, vsdbg should be able to user out of VSCODE

[alex-jitbit]

As a business owner I understand that MS is trying to build a moat. But the result will just be less people using C# and switching to Go, Rust, JS because Cursor is better than Copilot 😔 :-(

[tonyqus]

Update: .NET team is working on extracting the debugging structure from the licensed debugger dll. Search 'cDAC' in the issues of dotnet runtime repo

dotnet/runtime#111734
dotnet/runtime#110758

[bharathwajv]

Its been some days, any update?

[moacirbrg]

As a business owner I understand that MS is trying to build a moat. But the result will just be less people using C# and switching to Go, Rust, JS because Cursor is better than Copilot 😔 :-(

This is exactly what I am doing. For some new projects I was thinking if I should use C# which if my preference, but considering the productivity I have in visual studio, rider or visual studio code is way worse than using tool such as Cursor, I decided to choose productivity and migrate from C# to any other programming language without this kind of restriction.

[tonyqus]

Cursor is better than Copilot

I totally agree! Give me a thumbs-up if you also agree, haha!

[tonyqus]

I guess this will not change until Julia Liuson leaves the Visual Studio team.

Btw, I just notice that Julia Liuson is also from Shanghai, China.

[dorthl]

It's a pity that the closed nature of dotnet made me choose to give it up.