Generated code can be harder to debug

In Chapter 6, Diving Deep into Source Generators, we looked at a simple generator that can do a lot of stuff for us. Generating hundreds of service classes can save us time that we can spend typing better code.

However, I did not mention anything about debugging the generator itself because we did not need to. In the real world, the code that we create will not run perfectly on the first run every time. So, what are our options in terms of debugging the source generators?

Exploring generated code

We can explore generated code right from Visual Studio. The generated code is located in the project referencing the generator, not in the generator itself, under Dependencies | Analyzers. Here, you can see the project attached as a generator by its project name. Inside is our list of all generators created in the project and for each generator, there’s a list of generated files.

What I am talking about is not purely a debugging method...