Is it possible to debug the Quartz.NET Windows service? - asp.net-mvc

Question

I've got my app code in one solution and the Quartz.Net code in another. My app code connects to the service and registers a job but no break points are hit in the Quartz.NET solution despite the Visual Studio instance for the Quartz.Net code being attached to the service process. (Out of interest, when registering the job in my app, I can step into the Quartz.Net source code. It loads the source into my app's instance of Visual Studio.)
If I attach the debugger to the service process from the Visual Studio instance that contains my app code then a break point in my custom job source code says that the symbols haven't been loaded and so won't break. The dll that contains the custom job is not in the list of modules.
Any ideas? What I'm after is debugging my custom job that's loaded by the service when it starts. The dll that contains the custom job I've copied into the same folder as the Quartz.net bin directory and is definitely loaded OK because the job actually runs!
Cheers, Ian.

Answer 1

Have you also copied the custom job .pdb file?
you could also change the build destination to be in the Quartz.Net folder, no need to keep copy files around.

Answer 2

The way I do this is have a bit of code to the start of the job like :
if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
Then I open Visual Studio and attach the debugger to the Quartz.Net service. When the job starts, it will break into the debugger and I can then add breakpoints at other places.

Answer 3

What I would do is to create an Asp.Net core console application and with the application executable file I will create a Windows Service using sc. Below is my Program class.
using Backup.Service.Extensions;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting;
using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
namespace Backup.Service
{
public class Program
{
static async Task Main(string[] args)
{
var isDebugging = !(Debugger.IsAttached || args.Contains("--console"));
var hostBuilder = new HostBuilder()
.ConfigureServices((context, services) =>
{
services.AddHostedService<BackupService>();
});
if (isDebugging)
{
await hostBuilder.RunTheServiceAsync();
}
else
{
await hostBuilder.RunConsoleAsync();
}
}
}
}
If we are running the application locally/debug, we are calling the extension method RunConsoleAsync() or else we call our own custom extension method RunTheServiceAsync().
I had written a complete article on this topic, you can read it here. You can also see the complete source code in the GitHub here.