Help Contributing

[raggedstetson]

Hello All,

I have been working on an article about ASP.Net Core Identity. I have made a lot of progress and I would like to share with the community, but there are some little questions I'd like to dig in on. In order to do so, I would like to be able to build the apsnetcore 8.* branch of this repo. I am using a brand new (clean, no old libraries or old code or different versions of anything), M1 Mac, running VS Code. I can debug and step into the aspnetcore source code, but I cannot use code navigation (go to definition). I debug using the Microsoft Symbol Servers and C# extension, and it is working well. I have tried to set up SourceLink, but it doesn't seem to help with code navigation (or it isn't working). Alternatively, and maybe preferably, I have tried using a dev container to host the aspnetcore source, but the dev container consistently fails to build (whether I open from local folder after cloning or open directly from cloned repo). I thought, if I could build a dev container with a bind volume on my local machine (holding the aspnetcore source and artifacts), then I could build aspnetcore in that container, build my personal code in another container, and then use a project reference to be able to debug and do code navigation. I would even be satisfied just building the aspnetcore source in a dev container and editing one of the samples in that same container to run my tests. Unfortunately, I cannot get any of these options working. Since this is where all of the contributors are, I thought someone here must have a similar environment, and I hoped someone would be willing and able to help me. As I mentioned, I can debug my code, debug aspnetcore source, build sample remote containers, etc. I just can't get a full environment (debug + code navigation) in a dev container containing the aspnetcore source code. I'm willing to pay for help as well. I would just really like to progress on my efforts, and I am stuck on this configuration problem. Can anyone help, please?

As an aside:
I have read all of the VS Code Dev Container links, and 50 other articles.
I have watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVdwb41FPvU
And, I have followed docs/BuildFromSource.md

[raggedstetson]

I got everything working, but I will put some notes here in case it helps anyone else. Similar to the issue in these two links:

microsoft/vscode-dev-containers#1502
https://forums.docker.com/t/docker-compose-bind-volumes-are-empty-on-macos-ventura-13-1-but-work-on-12-x/134406/3

I found that my bind volumes were coming up empty. When I inspected the volumes in docker desktop, the mappings were correct. However, in VS Code, none of the files/folders could be seen. After reading the links, it seemed like the issue might have something to do with a bug in docker desktop. I upgraded my Mac from Monterey to Ventura, and then did an upgrade on DockerDesktop. Magically, everything started working again.

So, if anyone sees something like bash: file not found, please check that your volume is not empty, and try to upgrade if it is. I hope that can save someone a few hours or days.