The async stepping blob's first field is the compiler-generated catch
handler's IL offset plus one, and 0 when there is nothing to record. ILSpy
wrote the raw offset, so a consumer decoding it as (value - 1) resolved an
address in the middle of an instruction: Mono.Cecil throws
ArgumentNullException while reading the body, which is why the reported
assembly opened in ILSpy but killed ILLink on every MoveNext it had.
CatchHandlerOffset now holds the offset it is named after, or -1 for "none",
and BuildBlob applies the bias - the same model the compiler uses.
It is recorded only where an escaping exception is unlikely to be observed:
an async void method, and an async entry point. Recording it more widely
would be worse than recording it nowhere, because an async Task method
returns its exception through the Task and the debugger would then break on
exceptions user code catches. Measured over csc 1.3.2 to 5.10: async void is
handler+1 and a normal async Task is 0 in every version; only async Main
changed, from 0 to handler+1 between 2.10 and 3.11.
The entry point token names the synchronous '<Main>' shim that exists because
the runtime will not take .entrypoint on an async method, so the method to
record is the one the shim calls. Reading that call is exact; matching the
shim's siblings by name is not, and gets a 'Main' overload beside the real
entry point wrong.
Both tests compare against the compiler's own PDB for the same assembly, so
the blobs describe the same IL and the field compares directly.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5:Claude Code
Siegfried Pammer
4e2f28109e