Debugging Feature Receivers

Feature receivers can be difficult because they are often executed within a separate process. To see an example of this problem put a breakpoint on the first line of our FeatureActivated method and try debugging using Visual Studio.  The code will be deployed and the feature will be activated, but execution will not stop at the breakpoint.  Visual Studio makes use of a separate process, VSSPHost.exe, to automate the deployment only, and therefore the breakpoint is never hit but the code still execures.

        We can work around this issue in one of two ways: we can either attach a debugger to the appropriate process, or we can ensure that our feature receiver runs in the W3SVC process. To ensure  that a debugger is attached to the correct process, we can take the following steps:

   

            1.   Add the following line of code to the method to be debugged:

    Debugger.Break();

   When error window open then select “Debug the Program”