aspnetcore-debugger-mcp

macOS Apple Silicon — building netcoredbg (advanced)

You don’t need this for normal use — the AspNetCoreDebuggerMcp NuGet package bundles a prebuilt arm64 macOS netcoredbg binary that the tool resolves automatically. This page is only relevant if you want to build your own (e.g. to track a newer Samsung release than what we ship, or for development).

Samsung doesn’t publish an arm64 macOS prebuilt of netcoredbg, so the bundled binary is our own build. This repo includes the same script we use to produce it.

Prerequisites

Xcode Command Line Tools — xcode-select --install
CMake — brew install cmake
.NET 10 SDK — dotnet.microsoft.com/download
git

Run the script

./scripts/build-netcoredbg-macos-arm64.sh

What it does:

Clones Samsung/netcoredbg (shallow) to ~/projects/netcoredbg-src (override with a first arg)
Configures via CMake with the modern-CMake policy override (-DCMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM=3.5)
Builds with all cores (make -j$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu))
Installs into <src>/bin/
Prints the NETCOREDBG_PATH to export

When it finishes, you’ll see:

Built: /Users/you/projects/netcoredbg-src/bin/netcoredbg

Add this to your shell profile (and current shell):
    export NETCOREDBG_PATH=/Users/you/projects/netcoredbg-src/bin/netcoredbg

Is it stable?

Samsung’s docs say the arm64 macOS build is “community supported and may not work as expected.” In our testing on Apple Silicon, every debugger feature used by this project works correctly, except dataBreakpointInfo (returns E_NOTIMPL) — see Known limits.

The validated-on-arm64 functionality includes: launch, attach, line/function/exception breakpoints (with conditions, hit counts, logpoints), step in/over/out, threads, stack traces, scopes, variables, evaluate, setExpression, exceptionInfo, output events.

How this is distributed

We run this build script once per netcoredbg release, package the result into a tarball matching Samsung’s official tarball layout (scripts/package-netcoredbg-osx-arm64.sh), and upload it as a GitHub release asset on a vendor-netcoredbg-<version> tag. The release workflow’s scripts/fetch-netcoredbg-binaries.sh pulls this tarball along with the four Samsung-prebuilt RIDs, and dotnet pack includes them all under runtimes/<rid>/native/ in the NuGet package.

End users get the bundled binary automatically — they never have to run this script.

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