How to enable CodeLens for viewing Application Insights telemetry directly in Visual Studio for Web API projects

I had been using Application Insights for a while with a Web API project and found it immensely valuable for monitoring how the Web API was performing and discovering any issues in production.

I only recently stumbled across the fact that for ASP.NET projects, the Application Insights telemetry is surfaced and available in your source code within Visual Studio using CodeLens.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/visual-studio-codelens

I was wondering why I wasn’t seeing this for my project and it seems you only get this magic happening automatically if your project is ASP.NET. My project was a Web API project.

Luckily it didn’t take long to find the answer here:
https://feedback.azure.com/forums/357324-application-insights/suggestions/15697332-support-code-lens-exception-display-for-all-net-p

I followed the steps posted on the comment of this thread. By adding this into an existing Product Group within the project .csproj file.

<ApplicationInsightsResourceId>/subscriptions/[subscription-id]/resourceGroups/[resource-group-name]/providers/microsoft.insights/components/[app-insights-resource-name]</ApplicationInsightsResourceId>

Note: When substituting values into the above, Resource Group and App Insights are the display name shown in Azure not the ids.

You will need to close and re-open the project in Visual Studio for the changes in the .csproj file to take affect. Once this happens you should be able to right-click on your project in Solution Explorer window and see an Application Insights menu option.