The beta is out, so I dusted off my test project and checked it out.
The transition was fairly painless, and the great news is that it works with Visual Studio 2005. No more of that Express crap! (to be fair, VC# Express is quite good for the price)
I was curious about the Content Pipeline stuff since I had never touched it before, so I set out to prepare a custom Model processor that would extract more detailed material parameters from the source art, including a property to specify a specific fx shader / effect. There are better ways to do that if your 3D package has HLSL integration and a good .X exporter, but that was not the point.
All was well until I figured I needed to debug my custom processor. Hm… how do I do that? Read the comments for the gory details.
The help file in theory explains how to do it, but it didn’t work for me (hence this post). Note that trying to debug content processors with VC# Express is way more painful. My normal solution contains the following projects:
– "MyGame" Project
– "Content" Sub-project (new approach in 2.0)
– "CustomContentPipeline" project
I added a new Empty C# project to the solution. I called it "ContentPipelineTest". The a few steps to make it work:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\MSBuild.exe
I have like 6 or 8 different versions of MSBuild scattered around the hard drive, so it took a few tries until I got the right one.
if exist $(SolutionDir)bin\x86\Debug\Content\Models\MainShip.xnb
del $(SolutionDir)\bin\x86\Debug\Content\Models\MainShip.xnb
The file MainShip.fbx is one of the content files that I have configured to run using my custom processor, and the one I have chosen to debug build process. You need the "If Exist" stuff in there because if the file has not been rebuilt since the last time, del will return an error and Visual Studio will stop the build. Feel free to install a unix-like rm tool and use "rm -f", or the cleaner
touch $(SolutionDir)Content\Models\MainShip.fbx
If someone knows how to tell MSBuild to rebuild one specific file, this step wouldn’t be needed, so I’m all ears.
Make sure to enable "Only Build Startup projects and dependencies on Run" in Options | Projects and Solutions | Build And Run.
Now, whenever I want to debug my custom processor, I simply set the ContentPipelineTest project as the Startup project, and hit F5. The pre-build step will delete the output file for one of the source content files, and therefore guarantee that the file has to be rebuilt. Then, the Debug external app runs MSBuild on the content subproject, notices that a file needs rebuilding, and proceeds, stopping at my breakpoints and letting me debug the content processor for my file cleanly.
Once I am happy with the content processor, I simply switch the Startup Project to my game project and hit F5. A small annoyance is that if I ever hit Ctrl-Shift-B to build the solution, it builds all projects regardless of the above setting, and will also do the post-build step and delete that xnb file. F5 works fine. You can also unload the content test project, or unselect it from the Configuration Manager until you need to debug your content pipeline again.
Hope this helped. If you follow this method, make sure to carefully check that each path you set is really correct, because it is hard to get good diagnostics when setting external tools like MSBuild. That was the source of my problems in the post above.
As long as you have a version of Visual Studio that can debug a process, you can just add this to the top of your content processor:
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch();