Debugging a Custom Component
To call a custom component that is hosted by Notification Services, you must build and run a Notification Services application that calls the component. You cannot use this method to debug a non-hosted event provider, because they are not hosted by the Notification Services engine.
If Notification Services is running as the NS$instanceName Microsoft Windows service, you can start the service and attach a debugger to the running process, which is NSService.exe. If more than one instance is running, there are multiple NSService.exe processes running.
Alternatively, you can run the Notification Services engine as a console application to debug application components in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. To do this, follow these steps:
- In Visual Studio .NET, right-click the project containing the custom component, click Properties, and then click Debug.
- In the Start Action section, select Start external program, and then type the fully-qualified path to NSService.exe. The default location for this file is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\NotificationServices\9.0.242\bin\.
- In the Start Options section, type the following in the Command Line Arguments box:
* instanceName*-a
instanceName is the name of the instance you want to debug, without the NS$ prefix. The -a argument specifies to run the service as a console application. For example, you would enter Tutorial -a for the Tutorial instance. - Place a breakpoint in the custom component code wherever you want the debugger to stop.
- Start the solution.
- Drop events into the system, so that the application starts processing.
See Also
Other Resources
Developing Custom Notification Services Components