Debugging gRPC client components inside a .NET application

We all know how to debug our own code. We can place breakpoints on the line we want to see the behavior of. We can get the code to output to the console. We can get it to output to a file.

But what if we need to debug a third-party library? What if it's not our own code that doesn't behave as expected and we need to know why? After all, unless you try to decompile the library or try to get hold of its source code, its internal code is inaccessible to us. But even if we could get hold of the source code, it would be cumbersome to apply it to our own solution.

Luckily, gRPC libraries on .NET allow you to debug their internal middleware. If you are getting some unexpected behavior from them, you will be able to capture their actions and see what they are trying to do.

We will now go through the techniques you can apply to obtain as much debugging information from gRPC components as possible. We will start with...