Remote Debugging in Visual Studio – Part 1

Every Visual Studio developer has probably come across the need of Remote Debugging at some point during development. I too faced that situation.Visual Studio supports remote debugging from one computer to another. When you are doing remote debugging, the host computer can be any platform that supports Visual Studio on which you control the debugging process. The remote computer can be a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows or Arm platform on which the debugger is run. It ships along with all versions of Microsoft Visual Studio.

Fore more about setup and configure Remote Debugger please visit  How to: Set Up Remote Debugging

Debugging process is controlled from the host and the listener on the remote computer that executes commands sent from Visual Studio. Here the listener is Remote Debugging monitor (msvsmon.exe).

The next important thing is security. You can either perform debugging in NoAuthentication mode or in Windows Authentication mode. Windows Authentication mode requires the same account to be setup on the host and the remote compute and both usernames and passwords must be the same. NoAuthentication mode which allow all people to access your debugging monitor.

Once finished the configuration part, deploy the application and pdb files on the remote machine and begin with starting msvsmon.exe on the same. We can now either start the application under the debugger or attach the debugger to the already running process.

Let’s start with the first scenario : start the remote debugging by modifying the start project properties page

If you don’t have access to the application solution, then you need to use the application EXE file. From Filemenu choose Open->Project/Solution… and find the EXE file for your application. Select the newly opened project and choose properties. Fill the page with following values:

Pressing F5 will start the remote application, now you can debug application on the remote machine like how you debug application in the local machine.

My next blog is about :  How to Attach and Debug application in Cross Domain

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