I have a solution where I load some dlls at runtime with Assembly.LoadFile. Because these dlls can come from multiple sources at any time, I cannot add them as a dependency to the main application. It seems that Visual Studio won't load pdb files for dlls that are not marked as a dependency.
I don't want to add each dll I'm debugging to the dependencies just to debug them. Is there a way to manually load symbols for these external dlls?
You should set the (plugin) assembly as startup project and in the properties screen at the Debug tab, you can change the start action. Change it to "Start external program" and select the main project assembly(exe).
When you copied the output of the plugin to the main projects output by hand, you have to change the output path in the Build tab, so the plugin comes in the right path to be loaded by the main program.