Breakpoints are not hit while debugging xunit test that includes a large string

Wednesday, August 29, 2018 by Nate Bross

Someone asked on Stack Overflow:

I have a test that uses some Base64 encoded strings as parameters to a method. The test runs and passes (or fails if I modify the method to a failed state). The point is that the test framework executes as expected.

When I try to debug the test through Visual Studio (or VSCode) the debugger starts, loads symbols, and then exits with my test case showing a passing state. No Breakpoints are hit.

I only identified this large string by trial an error, removing one test case at a time until I was able to successfully hit breakpoints.

This method reproduces the problem. Even though its not used, comment out b64 and you should be able to hit breakpoints through the debugger, uncomment it and breakpoints fail.

This happens with xunit 2.3.1 and 2.4.0; not sure if its even an xuint thing, but I’m trying to figure out what I can do to debug this method.

Run dotnet new xunit and drop this test in: https://gist.github.com/fuzzzerd/8347a8609fd1ccabdfaeea564d42a976 (snip is too large for question body)

I posted the following answer, which was chosen as the accepted answer:

Looks like I’m running into this issue: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/20118. There’s no work around posted, but loading from a file does successfully work around this issue.

Originally posted on Stack Overflow — 0 upvotes (accepted answer). Licensed under CC BY-SA.