VS Code 1.13 uses the following heuristic to decide whether a DA supports loading stack frames ranges: it request a single frame (startFrame: 0, levels: 1). If the DA returns more frames, VS Code assumes that the DA does not support ranges.

This heuristic fails if there is only one frame available or if the DA honours 'levels' but not 'startFrame'. This latter case is the reason for the mono-debug problem.

Since we have not found a way to fix the heuristic in a robust way, we've decided to require that DAs opt-into the delayed loading of stack frames by introducing a new capability supportsDelayedStackTraceLoading.

@roblourens please enable the supportsDelayedStackTraceLoading for the inspector protocol.

@delmyers @gregg-miskelly @MSLaguana @DanTup @devoncarew @WebFreak001 @roblourens @andysterland @hbenl @lukaszunity @svaarala @ramya-rao-a @vadimcn @felixfbecker @daviwil @rkeithhill @DonJayamanne @MSLaguana @rebornix in order to benefit from delayed stack trace loading your adapters now need to explicitly specify this capability supportsDelayedStackTraceLoading.

This is the original feature request, however we have now introduced a capability as @weinand mentions in the comment above. The capability is available in the preview version of the adapter npm module.

@ishanarora @weinand Do we need to target a specific Code version to use supportsDelayedStackTraceLoading and if so, is it one that's already shipped or is this currently only usable in Insiders?

VS Code will make use of supportsDelayedStackTraceLoading in the June release (that's the reason for the June 2017 "milestone" on this issue) or in current Insiders.
But as always you can use it in your debugAdapter already and it will just be ignored by older versions of VS Code.

@weinand Do we need an updated vscode-debugprotocol to get supportsDelayedStackTraceLoading? The latest one on npm doesn't have these changes (apologies if this is a silly question; I haven't had to use anything that wasn't released yet). Thanks!

As Isi said: "The capability is available in the preview version of the adapter npm module." So either load the "pre" version (like I do for node-debug: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-node-debug/blob/master/package.json#L31) or wait until I've released the final version of the npm module Wednesday next week.

@weinand Apologies; I missed that but also didn't realise that the npm page doesn't show that there is a pre-release (it shows "1.20.0 is the latest of 97 releases" with seemingly no way to view a full list or pre-releases - I'm used to NuGet!). Everything's clear now, thanks! 👍