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In this article, we will review how to attach a running Commerce Engine instance to the Visual Studio Debugger for local debugging.
Introduction
In Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.X.Y, the Commerce Engine was built on .NET Core 2.2 or lower, which either only supported the out-of-process hosting or is the default configuration. This meant that IIS was essentially being used as a proxy to forward requests to the Commerce Engine application, which is why you are probably familiar with attaching the debugger to a process named Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.exe. By hovering over the process, the source Commerce Engine could easily be identified when attaching the process to Visual Studio.
Sitecore Experience Commerce 10 now leverages .Net Core 3.1, which uses in-process hosting, meaning the Commerce Engine instance run in the same process as its IIS worker process. Overall, the in-process hosting provides improved performanced as requests aren’t being proxied over the loopback adapter.
Now that we have a better understanding of the switch from out-of-process to in-process hosting in XC 10, it should be apparent as to why we need to amend how we attach the Commerce Engine to Visual Studio’s debugger.
Attaching the Commerce Engine instance to the Visual Studio Debugger
First thing we will need to do is to retrieve the process Id to verfiy that we are attaching the correct process in Visual Studio. To do this, open IIS and navigate to the Worker Processes view.
In the Worker Processes view, look for the application pool name containing the name of the application pool configured for the Commerce Engine instance and note the Process Id.
If the application pool does not show the Commerce Engine instance, it has likely not started, or shut down due to inactivity. Execute a request to the Commerce Engine instance and refresh the Worker Processes view in IIS.
Over in Visual Studio, open the Attach to Process dialog, select the Show processes from all users as you will likely be running the Commerce Engine under a dedicated user profile, and locate the ID that we identified from the Worker Proccesses view in IIS. The ‘w3wp’ can also be applied to the process filters to more easily locate the process.
References
Microsoft: Host ASP.Net Core on Windows with IIS > Hosting models