Hi @predavid some quick feedback for you.

I'm trying to get up and running with WPF on Windows 10 ARM64, and am happy to provide feedback.

I have had no success debugging a WPF application on ARM64 with .NET 6 Preview 1, either locally on an ARM64 device or using Remote Debug. I am able to "dotnet build" and "dotnet run" the WPF app using pure ARM64, but cannot debug it.

My setup
Development PC: Windows 10 x64, VS2019 Preview 4, .NET 6 SDK Preview 1 x64
ARM64 PC: Surface Pro X, Windows 10 ARM64, Remote Tools for VS2019 (ARM64), .NET 6 SDK Preview 1 ARM64
Test App: Plain WPF app, with a button added that has a click handler (so I can put a breakpoint in the handler)

I did not install the x86 remote debug tools or the x86 version of the .NET 6 SDK Preview on the Surface Pro X.

Question
Do you have any instructions on how to debug WPF applications on ARM64 (either locally or remotely, using either Visual Studio 2019 Preview 4 or using Visual Studio Code)?

For reference, here are all the things I attempted. I gave it the old college try. I am having zero success.

Attempt 1
Compiled sample app for "Any CPU" on my x64 dev machine, copied the bin folder to my Surface Pro X (same folder path on both devices). I then ran Remote Debugger on the Surface Pro X and selected the auto-detected Surface Pro X in the csproj's debug-tab properties in VS.

This was not successful. I think that Remote Debugger is trying to launch the EXE (which is an Intel app) instead of the platform-agnostic DLL. [Knowing this, I did a "dotnet build" on the Surface Pro X so that an ARM64 EXE was written out instead; VS2019 Preview 4 was then able to remotely launch and stop the app...but could not debug it, saying that no debug symbols were found/loaded.]

Attempt 2
I tried copying the ARM64-compiled files from the ARM64 device to the x64 development computer. That did not help...same "no debug symbols" error, no ability to debug.

Attempt 3
I changed the csproj settings to launch the EXE directly on the target machine (instead of launching "project"). And I separately also configured the csproj debug settings to launch "dotnet run" and also "dotnet [appname].dll". All of those resulted in launching the application...but still without any ability to debug it ("no debug symbols").

Attempt 4
I added an "x64" target to the solution and then manually edited the solution and project files to change the text "x64" to "ARM64", hoping that Visual Studio would build ARM64 files instead. [VS2019 won't let me add ARM64 for a WPF application directly.]. This did not result in an ARM64 executable being built, and this attempt also failed.

Thinking that perhaps Visual Studio built the files as Intel because there was no ARM64 SDK installed, I then also tried installing the .NET 6 Preview 1 SDK for ARM64 on my x64 machine. That of course did not work, as the installer targets only ARM64 CPUs.

Attempt 5
Finally I tried installing VS2019 Preview 4 on the Surface Pro X itself (which the VS2019 Preview 4 installer warns is a terrible idea, noting that Remote Debugger is a much better option). I can build the app as ARM64 and can run it from the command line, but I cannot debug it. When I press F5 in the VS2019 Preview 4 IDE, it says that "the debugger is not properly installed" and instructs me to repair my VS2019 Preview 4 installation.

WPF ARM64 Support now available in .NET 6 Preview 1 #4117

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predavidopenedon Feb 1, 2021

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predavid
openedon Feb 1, 2021