Unable to load characters or break basic assemblies, loading characters

Question

I set the "Use character server" options and just to make sure that the correct characters were loaded, I deleted the character cache. When I started my ASP.NET application, I saw a pop-up message stating that the characters were loading.

I turned off "Only my code" and turned on "Include .NET Framework source step". In the past, this was enough to go through the .NET code libraries.

When I stop using IntelliTrace, all non-user code in the call stack turns gray. Checking the module window, he says, for example, for System.Web.Dll and mscorlib "Symbols not loaded" for System..dll and System.Xml.dll, he says "Loaded symbols".

You can usually right-click and select "Download Symbols", but this is grayed out. Any idea to get this to work again?

http://www.undermyhat.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Grayed-out-Load-Symbols.png

Answer 1

Ritch's answer pointed me in the right direction, but that was not the solution. Here's what happened:

When you click Call Stack in the IntelliTrace event history, this will show the stack trace. Typically, in a stack trace, you can right-click and load the characters:

• From an IntelliTrace historical event, this will always be disabled. The break is usually in your code and this will work;
• You cannot even load symbols from the module view when in a historical event (also grayed out);
• When a module is specified as “always load manually” (aptly named “Default,” see screenshot of the Ritch message), it will not be automatically downloaded. When you download it manually, you still will not be able to enter the framework code (at least it was not possible for me, maybe VS 2010 error). To solve this problem:
  • select "Always download automatically" (note: you will not see a checkmark indicating that you selected this!) and
  • make a break and
  • (possibly) stopping the development web server (this helped me in some cases)
  • start debugging again.

Honestly, I find this relatively fuzzy behavior in Visual Studio. I used to be lucky that the settings were set correctly. This is not “it just works,” but only if you carefully go through the correct procedure, it will work as expected.

Answer 2

Since loading a Symbol may be slllloowww, and you are not always interested in each symbol table, it is possible to load a specific one manually. The reason you are grayed out is because you download them automatically. Here, a picture with manual dialing is taken and the option is enabled.

To enter this state, I configure my Symbol settings to load all characters. In addition, I added NHibernate to the list. When I break NHibernate, the characters are grayed out and can be loaded manually:

Then I have the opportunity to download them: