The breakpoint will not be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.

I’m about to do several blogs on SSIS Custom Components; these are the tasks that you code and add to the SSIS toolbox to include some sort of transformation or connection functionality that Microsoft might not have delivered.  Very cool and a lot of fun to write!  While working on these I wanted to debug one in Visual Studio, and the first time that I tried I got the following:

Figure 1.  My debug is jacked!

Debugging in Visual Studio (VS) isn’t that difficult.  I’ve debugged web apps and web services before so thought I’d give one of these Custom Components a go.  Had some problems, though.  I kept getting the following:

The breakpoint will not be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.

If you Google! this you’ll see 850 million hits come back with folks having a similar problem, clear back to 2004 in some cases.  I’m not sure what those problems were for them, but for me it was because the .dll that I compiled did not match the .dll that was being debugged, and this is not good.  If you click on the above picture you will see that the breakpoint that I set isn’t a solid color, and has a little warning icon next to it, a clear indication that your debug project is doomed for failure. You will immediately see this when you “Attach to Process…” (You can right-click and choose location and mark it OK to look in a different location, but don’t do that because your code might have changed).

What I did here was simply go to Project>>Properties and find out exactly where the .dll is compiling. I thought that mine was in the debug folder.  It was sort of…the Object>>Debug folder and not the bin>>Debug folder.  Another way to make sure is to simply check the date of the .dll.  If I had looked at this I could have found the problem sooner than I did. Remember that if you recompile your class, you’ll have to remove your custom component and add it back again.  It might not hurt to close BIDS and reopen it again as well and, obviously, you will want to delete your custom component and completely remove it from the toolbox and add back via “Choose Items”.

Figure 2. We’re gold!

Look for my series on SSIS custom components, and thanks for visiting my blog.

Lee

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“Like chill out, Scooby-Doo, stop shaking.”