A post from Georgi Bilyukov a couple of months ago about Debugging Sitecore Using DotPeek informed me of a new feature in the latest version of JetBrains dotPeek that allows it to function as a symbol as a symbol server. If you haven’t read the post then I suggest you have a quick read.

So this sounded great – a way to debug Sitecore code, see where those calls end up and what is going on in the internals.

I’ve been using dotPeek for a while now, and before that .NET Reflector. These tools have been invaluable in getting a peek at the Sitecore code, and has become an everyday tool alongside Visual Studio and Resharper. My usual way of trying to debugging something Sitecore related is:

• trial and error
• copying the code for an existing pipeline and adding it before the default Sitecore one
• override Sitecore controls, changing the codebeside to point to my own Class (which is also a copy of the Sitecore one)
• grepWin the /sitecore folder
• use dotPeek to generate a Visual Studio project and then grepWin the files to try and find something related as a starting point

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