Stepping between managed and unmanaged code in Visual Studio

Question

There are three projects:

• project A (my project, WPF .NET 4.5)
• project B (managed C++ with CLR (.NET wrapper for the FANN library))
• project C (unmanaged project made in C, (FANN library))

In Visual Studio 2012 with project A opened, I can't step into to the project C through the project B.

Project B and C are free and open source and I have already built them successfully.

Project A references project B's DLL and project A won't run if the project C's DLL file cannot be found - so I have copied and pasted the DLL for the project C inside the project and set "Copy always" to the output directory.

When stepping into during debugging, I can get only to the project B's source code. I don't even see the project C loaded in the Modules window which I do not understand at all. The project wouldn't run without the project C's DLL included and when it's included, it won't load but all the calls are working so it must be loaded somewhere.

I tried to include the project C's PDB file to the project A's output directory but no luck, function calls from project B to project C still get stepped over and never into.

Note that:

• Just My Code is disabled
• project C is included in the project B's in two ways - a "lib" file (in the linker settings) and its ".h" files in the source code are referenced... I don't know if that is the problem but you might.

I know there must be a way to achieve this, I have all the source code available but I'm no expert in C or C++ code, nor in debugging of it. I have tried including all the various project C's files from the bin directory to the project A but can't get it working.

Thanks for any help or advice!

Answer 1

If you're using Visual Studio, you have to explicitly enable debugging unmanaged code. You can do this from

Solution Explorer -> csproj -> Properties -> Debug -> Enable unmanaged code debugging