Automatically connecting to Visual Studio (not vscode) debugger

[goldsam]

I typically develop using Testcontainers with Xunit in Visual Studio (vscode less frequently). When I want to debug a containerized service test from within Visual Studio, I have to go through the pain of breaking the debugger first in my test code, and then manually attaching it to my container. This process involves quite a bit of clicking and is painfully slow. Is there any way to automate this easily?

From my initial research the answer is no. Testcontainers are launched from my tests (XUnit) running in the testhost, which has no direct way to interact with and automate the Visual Studio shell. For this to work would likely require a custom Visual Studio extension with some out-of-band communication between Visual Studio and the test running in the testhost.

Has anyone else considered this annoyance or gave it any thought? Is anyone interested in a more robust automation solution?

[edited for grammar]

[HofmeisterAn]

For local development, reuse might be helpful as it won't recreate the instance repeatedly. But I like the idea of automatically attaching to the container (shell) 💡.