.NET Core Debugging with WSL 2 in Visual Studio 2019

howdy mike morton here program manager
on the visual studio team
my team typically works on the container
tools
inside of visual studio and visual
studio code
but today i'm going to show you
something a little different this
feature i'm going to show you is great
for you.net core developers that are
using visual studio
so let me just go ahead and jump right
in and show you what this is
i have a new asp.net core application
that i created i'm just going to open up
the index page here and
add a little snippet to this
and we'll let intellisense help me here
and basically what i'll show is i'm just
going to print out the os version
so i'll go ahead and click to debug this
in is express
and my application will start up
and you'll see that we'll print out the
os version which as expected
is microsoft windows nt basically we're
running in windows
but often when you're building a net
core application
your target environment will be a linux
and uh machine
so one way to do that is to use
container debugging
and that's great and that works
extremely well for many situations
but we've created a lighter weight
scenario if i go here now in the drop
down
you'll see i have an option to use wsl 2
to debug my.net core application in so
if i just switch that debug target
and go ahead and click on the green
arrow to start debugging again
what you'll see is when my application
starts up
that environment os version is actually
a linux environment
we're debugging from windows inside of a
linux distribution inside of wsl2
so i can have that great productivity of
visual studio but i can also test my
application right inside of linux
what uh actually happens when you select
that wsl 2 is you'll see
we update our launch settings and we add
an additional
launch setting for wsl2 and you'll
notice here the distribution name
by default is left blank i can actually
set that to
a specific distribution name if i want
otherwise if you leave it blank
we'll go ahead and use the default
distribution that you've set up on your
machine
if needed you can actually have multiple
launch targets if you'd like
so i'll go ahead and copy that and i'll
put a comma there and just paste in a
second version here
and what i'll do is i'll set this to
debian
which is not my default and then i'll
set the that's just the friendly name
and then i'll set the distribution name
also to debian
and if i wanted to i could set this one
because i know my default is ubuntu i
could set that to ubuntu if i wanted to
and by leaving this blank again we'll
use the default
distribution if i go ahead and save that
now
you'll see up here in my drop down i now
have
a misspelled ubuntu we'll go ahead and
fix that real quick save that again
and we'll see that i have ubuntu and
debian so let's go ahead and switch to
debian
and just to show you that debugging
works let me go ahead and set a
breakpoint there
and we'll go ahead and start the
debugger and this time
our tools will do the the linux
debugging inside the debian
distro rather than the ubuntu distro and
here you can see
that we have our linux environment as
expected i can hit continue
and of course i'm debugging inside of
linux
if you'd like to try out the new wsl2
debugging
head on over to the visual studio
extension gallery or the marketplace
and install the.net core debugging with
wsl2
it's currently in preview and we'd love
to get your feedback
so if you don't mind go ahead and click
download and then when you restart
visual studio
you'll be presented with the wsl2
options like i showed you here today
all right thank you very much have a
great day