Assembly Load Debugger for Visual Studio 2017

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Channel 9.

Today's extension from Mads Kristensen is one that I hope you'll never need, but if you do, it will come in REAL handy...

Assembly Load Debugger

Shows what assemblies Visual Studio loads and what component caused it to load

Show the tool window

Go to View -> Other Windows -> Assembly Load Debugger to open the tool window.

image

Capturing assembly load events

Click the Capture button in the tool window to start capturing assembly load events. It will then start listing all the assemblies being loaded by Visual Studio.

image

Show the call stack from an assembly load

By clicking on any of the assembly names in the tool window will open a full call stack to help identify what component was responsible for loading the assembly.

Here's an example of what such a call stack could look like.

Contribute

Check out the contribution guidelines if you want to contribute to this project.

For cloning and building this project yourself, make sure to install the Extensibility Tools 2015 extension for Visual Studio which enables some features used by this project.

[Click through to download it]

And as always, he's open sourced it too! https://github.com/mlorbetske/VSAssemblyLoadDebugger