Does ms build script debugging still works?

[roozbehid]

There were some blog post about how to enable /debug on ms build and how attaching debugger and stepping into code would result in debugging csproj file.
Also I found more recent posts about setting environment variable that launches then attaches to ms build. I tried all of the and still cannot step into csproj or vcxproj.
Are these solutions still work

[rainersigwald]

No, that feature was never made official and has been removed. Logging, and especially binlogs combined with the Structured Log Viewer are the preferred debugging approach.

[roozbehid]

Sure but not good enough.
I am working on https://github.com/roozbehid/dotnet-vcxproj which enables reusing of vcxproj types for Linux and other compiler, so I do many msbuildish hacks. Problem is there are many properties that somehow popup and or item lists used that I don't know who sets them and bi logs also don't show who sets those properties or items.
Is there any other way to track such things?

[rainersigwald]

Yes, that information should be extractable in the logs (we're planning to make it easier with #2711, but it should be doable today). If you can share a concrete example of a problem you're facing I might be able to help?

[roozbehid]

Sure. Here I created almost empty .vcxproj library and then using msbuild to compile it.
This is the information I am seeing from MSBuild Log Viewer

What I want to know is, what set properties for each ClCompile. For example, for DynamicLib.cpp, I have ProgramDataBaseFileName = x64\Debug\vc143.pdb, I want to know what line of code set this?