AutoCAD 2012, Vistual Studio 2010 Express, debugging

The first thing to consider as an AutoCAD .NET developer facing upgrading to version 18.2 is you need .NET 4.0 to debug your AddIn. Now VS 2008 doesn't support .NET, so you have to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010.

We have installed one of the VS 2010 Express versions available to download, and tried to set up the environment. After a little research we found that in previous Express versions you had to modify the *.proj.user file to include a start action (old Kean Walmsley post). That procedure didn't work on our test machine, but we copied a .vbproj config file from a debugging enabled project, and we realized that the key entries were

<StartAction> Program </StartAction>
<StartProgram> {AutoCAD Architecture 2012 path}\acad.exe </StartProgram>

in the <PropertyGroup> for debugging in the .vbproj will give you the desired effect.

Now there is the debugger breakpoint issue and its possible solutions. On a quick test we could effectively set breakpoints, due to be using the same .NET version as the debugger in VS.

Let me know your experience!

Cheers