visual studio 2010 Symbols aren't loading for debugging

Question

I am working on Sharepoint 2010 projects in Visual Studio 2010 and i am trying to attach to the w3wp.exe process. I attach fine and a few of my assemblies show up in the Modules pane, but the main assembly i want to debug does not. I have done everything to specifying the place to look for the pdb and even copying the pdb to a folder and pointing VS to look at that folder for the symblos but it still hasn't helped.

• i have retracted and deployed
• I have Cleaned all projs in the solution and then REBUILT and deployeed
• I have rebooted
• deleted bin and obj directories, cleaned, rebuilt and deployed

I don't know what else to try. I have tried things from posts all over the web, anyone have anything else to try. keep in mind this is a SHarePoint 2010 server with Visual Studio 2010 on it.

Answer 1

As Alex implied, it's not always intuitive to figure out when to attach to w3wp.exe, but as a general rule of thumb, if you're not actually watching the content getting rendered (that is, it's not in a web part or an application page), you almost always want to attach to the SharePoint Timer Service (owstimer.exe) instead. This is obviously true with stuff like timer jobs but it's equally the case with workflows and event receivers where you haven't explicitly called them as synchronous.

Alex's links are great for this too. I will add that when in doubt, and you're debugging out of your own dev environment, it's not always the worst thing in the world to attach to both owstimer and your application pool's version of w3wp.

Answer 2

in the end, someone over wrote the web.config changes required for the module so the code was never executed. It never had anything to do with the symbols. Thanks ULS for showing me the way ;)

Thanks for the responses.....